- Colombian author became standard-bearer for Latin American letters after success of One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez – a life in pictures
From the archive: 1970 review of One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez in Monterrey in 2007. Photograph: Tomas Bravo/Reuters
The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who
unleashed the worldwide boom in Spanish language literature and magical
realism with his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, died at the age
of 87. He had been admitted to hospital in Mexico City on 3 April with pneumonia.
Matching
commercial success with critical acclaim, García Márquez became a
standard-bearer for Latin American letters, establishing a route for
negotiations between guerillas and the Colombian government, building a
friendship with Fidel Castro and maintaining a feud with fellow
literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa that lasted more than 30 years.
Barack
Obama said the world had lost "one of its greatest visionary writers",
adding that he cherished an inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of
Solitude, presented to him by the author on a visit to Mexico. "I offer
my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the
fact that Gabo's work will live on for generations to come."
Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said yesterday via Twitter:
"A thousand years of solitude and sadness at the death of the greatest
Colombian of all time. Solidarity and condolences to his wife and family
... Such giants never die."
García Márquez in Mexico City in March. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/Reuters
Journalists gathered outside García Márquez's house in Mexico City in
the hope that one of the family members who was reportedly at his side
would emerge.
Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto expressed
sadness at the death of "one of the greatest writers of our time," in
the name of Mexico, the novelist's adopted home. Chilean writer Luis
Sepúlveda was quoted by the Mexican newspaper Reforma as saying that he
was "the most important writer in Spanish of the 20th century", central
to the Latin American literary boom that "revolutionised everything: the
imagination, the way of telling a story, and the literary universe".
The
Colombian singer Shakira wrote: "We will remember your life, dear Gabo,
like a unique and unrepeatable gift, and the most original of stories."
Born
in a small town near the northern coast ofColombia on 6 March 1927,
García Márquez was raised by his grandparents for the first nine years
of his life and began working as a journalist while studying law in
Bogotá.
A series of articles relating the ordeal of a Colombian
sailor sparked controversy and saw him travel to Europe as a foreign
correspondent in 1955, the year in which he published his first work of
fiction, the short novel Leaf Storm. Short stories and novellas with the
realism of Hemingway as their inspiration followed, but after the
publication of The Evil Hour in 1962 García Márquez found himself at an
impasse.
Speaking to the Paris Review in 1981
he explained how he decided his writings about his childhood were "more
political" than the "journalistic literature" he had been engaged with.
He wanted to return to his childhood and the imaginary village of
Macondo he had created in Leaf Storm, but there was "always something
missing". After five years he hit upon the "right tone", a style "based
on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories".
"She told
things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with
complete naturalness," García Márquez said. "When I finally discovered
the tone I had to use, I sat down for 18 months and worked every day."
García Márquez with a copy of his book One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1975. Isabel Steva Hernandez (Colita)/Corbis
Right from the elliptical opening sentence – which finds Colonel
Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad and remembering the "distant
afternoon" many years before when "his father took him to discover ice" –
One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves together the misfortunes of a
family over seven generations. García Márquez tells the story of a
doomed city of mirrors founded in the depths of the Colombian jungle
with the "brick face" his grandmother used to tell ghost stories, folk
tales and supernatural legends.
The novel was an instant
bestseller, with the first edition of 8,000 copies selling out within a
week of its publication in 1967. Hailed by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
as "perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don
Quixote of Cervantes", One Hundred Years of Solitude went on to win
literary prizes in Italy, France, Venezuela and beyond, appearing in
more than 30 languages and selling more than 30m copies around the
world. García Márquez forged friendships with writers such as Carlos
Fuentes, Julio Cortazar and Vargas Llosa – a friendship that ended in the 1970s after Vargas Llosa floored the Colombian with a punch outside a Mexico City cinema.
The
Autumn of the Patriarch, which the author called a "poem on the
solitude of power", followed in 1975. García Márquez assembled this
story of the tyrannical leader of an unnamed Caribbean nation from a
collage of dictators such as Franco, Perón, and Pinilla, and continued
to draw inspiration from Latin America's history of conflict with a
novella inspired by the murder of a wealthy Colombian, The Chronicle of a
Death Foretold, published in 1981.
A year later he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature,
the Swedish Academy hailing fiction "in which the fantastic and the
realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination,
reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". Speaking at the ceremony in Stockholm,
he painted a picture of a continent filled with "immeasurable violence
and pain" that "nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of
sorrow and beauty".
"Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets,
warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we
have had to ask but little of imagination," he said, "for our crucial
problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives
believable."
An undated photo of García Márquez. Photograph: AP
The lives García Márquez next made "believable" were those of his
parents, whose extended courtship was rendered into Love in the Time of
Cholera, first published in 1985. The novel tells how a secret
relationship between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza is thwarted by
Fermina's marriage to a doctor trying to eradicate cholera, only to be
rekindled more than 60 years later.
A 1989 account of Simón
Bolívar's final months, The General in his Labyrinth, blended fact and
fiction, but García Márquez never left journalism behind, arguing that
it kept him "in contact with the real world". Clandestine in Chile,
published in 1986, was an account of the Chilean filmmaker Miguel
Littín, who returned to his homeland in secret to make a documentary
about life under General Augusto Pinochet. News of a Kidnapping explored
how prominent figures in Colombian society were snatched and imprisoned
by Pablo Escobar's Medellín drug cartel.
He continued to write,
publishing a memoir of his early life in 2002 and a novella that
chronicles an old man's passion for an adolescent girl in 2004, but
never regained the heights of his earlier masterpieces. His brother Jaime García Márquez revealed in 2012 that the writer was suffering from dementia after undergoing chemotherapy for lymphatic cancer first diagnosed in 1999.
Asked
in 1981 about his ambitions as a writer he suggested that it would be a
"catastrophe" to be awarded the Nobel prize, arguing that writers
struggle with fame, which "invades your private life" and "tends to
isolate you from the real world".
"I don't really like to say this
because it never sounds sincere," he continued, "but I would really
have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I
wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great
writer."
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More on this story
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Gabriel García Márquez – a life in pictures
A selection of images charting the Nobel laureate's journey from childhood in northern Colombia to global literary titan
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Gabriel García Márquez obituary
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Edmund White: Others had used magic realism. García Márquez made the technique his own
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Latin America reacts to death of literary colossus Gabriel García Márquez
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From the archive, 28 June 1970: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
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