Nobel Prize winner in ’82 and greatest exponent of the so-called magical realism, Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, aka “Gabo”, is much more than a writer. Inspired throughout his career by Jorge Louis Borges, Faulkner, Juan Rulfo, Virginia Woolf and Vargas Llosa, Marquez – a Colombian naturalized Mexican – became without too many difficulties the main representative of Latin American literature of the sixties and seventies. And not only that: Gabo harshly contested the death penalty, supported disarmament and denounced the United States’ crackdown on drugs.
We owe him the most beautiful pages of the twentieth century: from the history of the Buendía generations in One hundred years of solitude to the boundless love of Florentino in Love in the time of cholerapassing through the case of Chronicle of a death foretold.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez cannot be unread, if only because his flowing style is often crossed by a bitter irony, by interweavings between reality and fantasy and by the history that forms the background. It is no coincidence that Márquez also became a spokesperson for struggles for freedom and justice.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez, life and career
Gabriel Garcia Márquez was born to Gabriel Eligio García, telegrapher, and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, a small river village in the north-east of Colombia, but was raised in Santa Marta by his grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez and his wife Tranquilina Iguarán. Gabo has always been greatly influenced by his maternal grandfather, a liberal politician and veteran of many wars, and by his grandmother, a psychic. The first is often found in his military figures in novels such as The bad time (from 1966), The autumn of the patriarch (1975) e Nobody writes to the colonel (1958). And even grandmother Tranquilina, who made miraculous stories and ancient legends her own, is always present in the pages of Márquez, who thanks to her changes everyday life into a series of supernatural events. She, Tranquilina, lived in her own world of ghosts and superstitions, where the living and the dead coexisted peacefully, and she would undoubtedly lead to the magical Realism that would later make Márquez’s fortune.
Once his grandfather died in 1936, Gabriel moved to Barranquilla where he graduated ten years later from the Colegio Liceo de Zipaquirá.
In 1947 he began his studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota at the faculty of Law and Political Sciences (and then abandoned it) and in that same year he published his first story in the magazine El Espectator The third residence.
In 1948 he moved to Cartagena where he began working as a journalist for “El Universal” and as a collaborator for other American and European newspapers, at the same time joining a group of writers dedicated to reading the novels of authors such as Faulkner, Kafka and Virginia Woolf.
In 1954 he returned to Bogota as a journalist for “El Espectador”, when he published the story Dead leavesthen again the following year he lived in Rome for a few months, where he began to attend directing courses, and then moved to Paris. In ’58 he took Mercedes Barcha, the love of his life, as his wife, and from that marriage Rodrigo and Gonzalo were born.
With the rise of Fidel Castro, Gabo goes to Cuba and begins to collaborate with the “Prensa Latina” agency founded by Castro, but soon moves to Mexico City due to the constant threats from the CIA and Cuban exiles. Here he writes his first book Big Mama’s funeralwhile in 1967 he published one of his best-known novels, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the events of the generations of the Buendía family in Macondo. A work that is considered the maximum expression of the so-called magical realism.
They follow this masterpiece The autumn of the patriarch, Chronicle of a death foretold, Love in the time of cholera and in 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2001 he was struck by lymphatic cancer. However, in 2002 he published the first part of “Vivere per narrarla”, his autobiography and in 2005 he returned to fiction by publishing the novel Memory of my sad bitcheshis latest novel.
Gabo died on April 17, 2014, at the age of 87, in a clinic in Mexico City.
Márquez, magical realism between loneliness and sense of death
Márquez’s vocation has been for writing since his youth: for a living he began to be a journalist but would like to become a novelist straight away, knowing that he wanted to follow a style that is not realist but the one with which his grandmother told about ghosts.
Despite collaborating with Prensa Latina, Fidel Castro’s journalistic agency founded after the Cuban revolution, the young Márquez wants to remain far away from the world of politics. Declaredly critical of dictatorships and violations of human rights (after Pinochet’s coup in Chile he declared “not to publish” and one of his most famous texts, News of a kidnappingfrom 1996, tells the story of ten hostages kidnapped by Pablo Escobar’s drug traffickers), Gabriel always tries to avoid being involved in the affairs of the Cuban revolution.
Rather, he dedicates his writings to the miserable aspect of men, to war and abuse with a style linked to South American nature and to that magical realism that places poetics halfway between the magical, surrealist element and realist representation. Márquez claims to have limited himself to telling things that have already happened in his novels, but the influence of the psychic Tranquilina and that effect of “estrangement” through the use of magical elements, described equally realistically, is strong and clear.
The “Real Marvelous” is therefore very much in evidence in Márquez, it is no coincidence that he is considered the greatest Latin American exponent, and reproduces a microcosm in which the dividing line between the living and the dead is not at all clear, contributing to completely isolating the story from the rest.
It is a famous example of this, in One hundred years of solitudethe magical scene of the ascent to heaven of Remedios the beautiful, who disappears from the sight of the family while folding the sheets and which is actually inspired by something that happened: a friend of Márquez’s grandmother, ashamed to admit that her daughter had run away with a man, had said that the girl had been taken up into heaven right in her presence.
Gabo’s writings are not only a reflection on life and its ironic episodes, but also on the slow and inexorable passage of time and on death, which represents a constant presence in his writings. Furthermore, his characters are picturesque and at times ridiculous, but they are essentially alone. Alone in the face of an inevitable death and in the face of life, which for Gabriel García Márquez seems to be a continuous reflection of his end, with its ghosts that do not torment the living, but speak to us to chase away loneliness.
It is not surprising then that Gabo has always stood out for his aversion towards death and for his desire to observe life beyond the end, for that mystery and doubt that essentially run through all of his work. For Márquez, death is the greatest injustice and this is most likely the reason why the ghosts who converse with his characters are sad.
“Write a lot“, Gabo will say. It is the only antidote to avoid the worst.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez, famous phrases
You can be in love with several people at a time, and all with the same pain, without betraying any of them, the heart has more rooms than a brothel.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
All human beings have three lives: one public, one private and one secret.
(Live to tell the tale)
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
I realized that the invincible force that moves the world is not so much happy love, but unrequited love.
(Memory of my sad bitches)
Nothing says more about a person than the way they die.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
When a woman decides to go to bed with a man, there is no obstacle that she doesn’t overcome, no fortress that she doesn’t break down, no moral consideration that she isn’t willing to put aside: there is no God who is worth.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
It’s not true that people stop chasing dreams because they get old, they get old because they stop chasing dreams.
It happens that you touch someone’s life, you fall in love and you decide that the most important thing is to touch them, to experience them, to live with the melancholy and anxieties, to recognize yourself in the gaze of the other, to feel that you can no longer do without them… and what does it matter if to have all this you have to wait fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days including nights?
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
The secret to aging well is to have made a pact of honesty with loneliness.
(One hundred years of solitude)
A man knows when he is getting old because he begins to resemble his father.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
He was still too young to know that the memory of the heart eliminates bad memories and magnifies the good ones, and that thanks to this artifice we are able to tolerate the past.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
We don’t die when we have to, but when we can.
(One hundred years of solitude)
Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
She slept without knowing it, but knowing that she continued to be alive in her sleep, that half the bed was too many, and that she lay on her side on the left edge, as always, but that she lacked the counterweight of the other body on the other side.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
It is easier to start a war than to end it.
(One hundred years of solitude)
I’m about to turn one hundred, and I’ve seen everything change, even the position of the stars in the universe, but I still haven’t seen anything change in this country.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
Give me a bias and I will lift the world.
(Chronicle of a death foretold)
There is no sadder place in life than an empty bed.
(Chronicle of a death foretold)
Sex is the consolation you have when love isn’t enough.
(Memory of my sad bitches)
She never claimed to love or be loved, although she always had the hope of finding something that was like love, but without the problems of love.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
She was convinced that the doors had been invented to close them, and that curiosity about what was happening in the street was something for naughty women..
(One hundred years of solitude)
The only thing worse than bad health is bad fame.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
A casual glance was the origin of a cataclysm of love that half a century later had not yet ended.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
The world is moving forward. Yes, I told him, move forward, but going around the sun.
(Memory of my sad bitches)
It is impossible not to end up being what others believe one to be.
(Memory of my sad bitches)
But he let himself be carried away by his belief that human beings are not always born on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life forces them many other times to give birth on their own.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
Nobody teaches you life.
(Love in the Time of Cholera)
No madman is mad if one adapts to his reasons.
(Of love and other demons)
The ideas are nobody’s” he said. He drew a series of continuous circles in the air with his index finger, and concluded: “They fly around there, like angels.
(Of love and other demons)
There is no medicine that heals what happiness does not heal.
(Of love and other demons)
