- Novelist Was Best Known for 1967 Masterpiece 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'
The Wall Street Journal, Updated April 17, 2014 8:09 p.m. ET
Mr. García Márquez greets well-wishers on his 87th
birthday outside his home in Mexico City last month. The Colombian
author died on Thursday.
Reuters
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—The Nobel
Prize-winning author
Gabriel García Márquez
popularized magical realism in Latin American literature by
writing fantastical novels that drew on the folk tales and ghost stories
he had heard as a child on Colombia's poor, sun-baked Caribbean coast.
Mr.
García Márquez, who died in his Mexico City home at age 87 on Thursday
after being hospitalized for infections, was best known for his 1967
masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which recounted the
travails of the abundant and obsessive Buendía clan.
Translated
into dozens of languages and selling 30 million copies, the book is
considered literature's exemplar of magical realism, generating
countless imitations and inspiring a generation of writers in Latin
America and beyond.
Though Mr. García
Márquez didn't invent the technique, he became the leading exponent of
the style, which balances dreamlike, fantastical vignettes with sharply
focused realism, all of it solemnly delivered through an eccentric cast
of whimsical characters.
Readers of his
books have delighted in stories populated with tin-pot dictators, cows
that invade a palace, women that levitate, self-obsessed characters that
don't age and brokenhearted suitors.
The news triggered an outpouring of grief from Colombians, who venerate Mr. García Márquez and see his literature as reflecting the soul of their country.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos tweeted: "One-thousand years of
solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all
time!"
In a career spanning more than 60
years, Mr. García Márquez wrote some of the Spanish language's most
revered books, many of which became best sellers in the U.S.
They
included "Autumn of the Patriarch," about a Caribbean tyrant;
"Chronicle of a Death Foretold," which painstakingly narrates a
small-town murder; "Love in the Time of Cholera," about two lovers who
wait half a century to reunite, and "The General in his Labyrinth,"
detailing independence hero Simón Bolívar's inglorious last days.
Mr.
García Márquez was also an accomplished journalist, whose lyrical,
deeply reported stories first caught the eye of readers in Colombia's
chilly mountain capital, Bogotá, in the early 1950s.
He
later became renowned not only for his profiles of presidents and
despots but for the real-life close ties he cultivated with leaders
ranging from
Fidel Castro
to
Bill Clinton
to
François Mitterrand.
Mr. García Márquez found a
certain thrill in hobnobbing with the powerful, noted his friends. "I
still can't get used to the idea that my friends become presidents, nor
have I yet overcome my susceptibility to being impressed by government
palaces," he once wrote in an article, as recounted in
Gerald Martin's
2009 biography, "Gabriel García Márquez: A Life."
Proudly
leftist and anti-imperialist, he used his fame to try to lobby for
Latin American unity and an end to U.S. meddling in the region.
Mr.
García Márquez's friendship with Mr. Castro, though, caused him
trouble. Other Latin American writers, among them the Cuban exile
Guillermo Cabrera Infante,
criticized him for cultivating warm ties with a dictator.
"Castro's courtesan," the Peruvian author,
Mario Vargas Llosa,
took to calling Mr. García Márquez.
Mr. García Márquez said he was able to use his direct line to Mr. Castro to win the release of jailed dissidents.
"I
know how far I can go with Fidel," the author told the New Yorker.
"Sometimes he says no. Sometimes later he comes and tells me I was
right."
Mr. Vargas Llosa famously ended
his once-close friendship with Mr. García Márquez when he punched him in
a Mexico City theater in 1976 after accusing him of betrayal, wrote Mr.
Martin's biography.
Mr. García Márquez
also had strained relations with the U.S., with his close ties to Cuba
and sharp criticism of American policies leading the State Department to
deny him a visa for years.
Mr. García
Márquez had humble beginnings, born in the sleepy town of Aracataca on
March 6, 1927 and raised for much of his early years by his maternal
grandparents—Tranquilian Iguarán Cotes and Col.
Nicolás Márquez
—and two aunts.
The superstitions
and otherworldly tales he heard in their small, wood-plank home would
fire his imagination, especially those from the colonel. A veteran of
the War of a Thousand Days—a Colombian civil conflict—Col. Márquez told
his precocious grandson about the country's harrowing history, like the
mass killing of United Fruit Co. banana workers.
"The
great old man didn't tell me about Little Red Riding Hood," Mr. García
Márquez said years later. "He told me terrible stories about war, about
the massacre of the banana workers that took place the year I was born."
The
colonel's stories of massacres, feuds and duels, the solitude of
Aracataca and even his introduction to ice all found their way into
García Márquez's books. The colonel himself is a recognizable figure in
the author's fiction, notably as Colonel Aureliano Buendía in "One
Hundred Years of Solitude."
Writing
about his grandfather's death in his 2002 autobiography, "Living to Tell
the Tale," Mr. García Márquez said that "a piece of me had died with
him."
"But I also believe," Mr. García
Márquez wrote, "without the slightest doubt, that in that moment [when
he died] I was already a beginning writer who only needed to learn to
write."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez waves while coming out from his house on his 87th birthday March 6 in Mexico City.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
When he did learn, Aracataca, with
its infernal heat and almond trees, was transformed into the magical
town of Macondo in "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
The
novel's historic sweep and timeless writing helped Mr. García Márquez
win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Though Mr. García Márquez has
said "Autumn of the Patriarch" was his best book and readers gravitated
to "Love in the Time of Cholera," it was "One Hundred Years of
Solitude" that first cemented his fame.
Some
critics in Latin America said it was the most important book in the
Spanish language since Don Quixote, and the American author and critic
William Kennedy
called the novel "the first piece of literature since the Book of
Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
Mr.
García Márquez was self-deprecating about the book in some interviews,
saying that he didn't understand why it was so celebrated. But in
reality, the book's story arc percolated in his head for years, as they
did for many of his books.
"I know the
last sentence of the book before I sit down to write it," the author
explained. "When I sit down I have the book in my head, as if I'd read
it, because I've been thinking about it for years."
—Sara Schaefer Muñoz contributed to this article.
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