Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is admired by millions today for his rich and imaginative storytelling, and he will probably be as well known in the next century. After years of trying to achieve fame as a writer, he finally struck gold in 1967 when One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, a novel which led to his Nobel Prize in 1982; life for Garcia Marquez (or "Gabo", as he is affectionately called) was never the same again.

Garcia Marquez was born on March 6th, 1928 in Aracateca, Columbia. He was the only son of Gabriel Eligio Garcia and Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran, but spent his early life with his grandparents, Colonel Nicolas and Tranquilina. A shy boy, he often spent his time listening to them, both gifted storytellers, tell their tales. His grandfather would tell Gabriel about the time he shot and killed a man in a duel and his wartime exploits, while his grandmother filled his head with superstitions and folklore. These tales would later provide material for One Hundred Years of Solitude and become a part of the magical realism movement making its way out of South America.

Inspired by Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis" and Faulkner's world of Yoknapatawpha, Marquez recreated his own imaginary town of Macondo, which is loosely based on a real coastal town in Colombia. In this world readers follow the hopes and misfortunes of the Buendia family over a span of generations. Marquez has often said that this sort of storytelling grew out of his many years of listening to his grandmother recite folklore with a straight face, as if it were an everyday occurrence. Popularity of the stories grew and many other writers in South America began to adopt this style, which merges magical or inexplicable events into reality.

Marquez's talent crosses over into non-fiction. His work The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1955) describes how a sailor named Luis Velasco survived for ten days in the Atlantic by hanging onto a life raft after being washed overboard from a navy destroyer. When Velasco came ashore he was treated as a hero by the Colombian government and used as propaganda. Velasco came to the office of El Espectador, where Marquez was working as a reporter, and told him the unvarnished facts of the event (the ship was overloaded with contraband). After the story was published, the government threw Velasco out of the navy. Worried about retaliation, Marquez's editor sent him out of the country to cover a story in Rome.

With a strong interest in the political situation of Columbia, Marquez also wrote News of a Kidnapping in 1996. The book exposes the prevalent and lucrative drug trade and the atrocities that occur to Columbian citizens because of it. Marquez also became a close friend of Castro after visiting Havana to cover the Cuban Revolution. Obviously, this friendship did not sit well with either the United States or Columbia. His visits to the US were on a limited Visa status and had to be approved by the State Department prior to being issued.

Garcia Marquez now spends most of his time in Mexico City, but has often traveled to Cartagena and Barcelona to write and teach. His latest books, Vivir para contarla and his memoir Memoria de mis putas tristes (or "Memories of my melancholy whores") show a more mature and reflective style but still retain much of the beautiful, poetic language that infuses all of Marquez's writings. To appreciate his stories, one has to find the truth hidden behind the mesh of fantastic creatures and images his words invoke.

- Rhonda Niola

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