Nobel
laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating fiction from the fatalism,
fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world that set his mind churning as a child
growing up on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.One of the most revered and
influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America’s charm and
maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became the
best-known practitioner of “magical realism,” a blending of fantastic elements
into portrayals of daily life that made the extraordinary seem almost routine.
In his
works, clouds of yellow butterflies precede a forbidden lover’s arrival. A
heroic liberator of nations dies alone, destitute and far from home. A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, as
one of his short stories is called, is spotted in a muddy courtyard.Garcia
Marquez’s own epic story ended on Thursday, at age 87, with his death at his
home in southern Mexico City, according to two people close to the family who
spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family’s privacy.Known
to millions simply as ‘Gabo’, Garcia Marquez was widely seen as the Spanish
language’s most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century.
His extraordinary literary celebrity spawned comparisons with Mark Twain and
Charles Dickens.
With
writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early
practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New
Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with
magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor, the tale of a seaman
lost on a life raft for 10 days. He was also a scion of the region’s left.Shorter
pieces dealt with subjects including Venezuela’s larger-than-life president,
Hugo Chavez, while the book News of
a Kidnapping vividly
portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and
moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite. In 1994,
Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which
offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and
investigative journalism across Latin America.
But for
so many inside and outside the region, it was his novels that became synonymous
with Latin America itself.When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia
Marquez described the region as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of
sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one
cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets,
warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had
to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of
conventional means to render our lives believable.”Gerald
Martin, Garcia Marquez’s semi-official biographer, told The Associated Press that One Hundred Years of Solitude was
“the first novel in which Latin Americans recognised themselves, that defined
them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and
superstition, their grand propensity for failure”.The Spanish Royal Academy,
the arbiter of the language, celebrated the novel’s 40th anniversary with a
special edition. It had only done so for just one other book, Cervantes’ Don Quixote.Like many Latin American writers, Garcia
Marquez transcended the world of letters. He became a hero to the Latin
American left as an early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and
a critic of Washington’s interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable
visage, set off by a white moustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly
recognisable. Unable to receive a U.S. visa for years due to his politics, he was
nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill Clinton and
Francois Mitterrand among his presidential friends.
Garcia
Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast
on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga
Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic
pharmacist who fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.Just
after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal
grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez’s father opened
the first of a series of homeopathic pharmacies that would invariably fail,
leaving them barely able to make ends meet.Garcia
Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a
retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened
Colombia’s loss of the Panamanian isthmus.“I have often been told by the family
that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born,”
Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. “Ever since I could speak.”Garcia
Marquez’s parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their
first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota
where he became a star student and voracious reader, favouring Hemingway,
Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Garcia
Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a
short story to the newspaper El
Espectador after
its literary editor wrote that “Colombia’s younger generation has nothing to
offer in the way of good literature anymore.”Garcia
Marquez wrote in 1955 about a sailor, washed off the deck of a Colombian
warship during a storm, who reappeared weeks later at the village church where
his family was offering a Mass for his soul.“The Story of a Shipwrecked
Sailor uncovered
that the destroyer was carrying cargo, the cargo was contraband, and the vessel
was overloaded. The authorities didn’t like it,” Garcia Marquez recalled.Several
months later, while he was in Europe, dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla’s
government closed El
Espectador.
In
exile, he toured the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955 to study
cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived among
intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American dictatorships of
the day.Garcia Marquez returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a
neighbour from childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and
Gonzalo, a graphic designer.Garcia Marquez’s
writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views, themselves
forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near Aracataca of banana
workers striking against the United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita.
He was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of Jorge
Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanising leftist presidential candidate.The killing would
set off the ‘Bogotazo’, a weeklong riot that destroyed the centre of Colombia’s
capital and which Castro, a visiting student activist, also lived through.Garcia
Marquez would sign on to the young Cuban revolution as a journalist, working in
Bogota and Havana for its news agency Prensa
Latina, then later as the agency’s correspondent in New York.
Garcia
Marquez wrote the epic One
Hundred Years of Solitude in 18
months, living first off loans from friends and then by having his wife pawn
their things, starting with the car and furniture.By the
time he finished writing in September 1966, their belongings had dwindled to an
electric heater, a blender and a hairdryer. His wife then pawned those
remaining items so that he could mail the manuscript to a publisher in
Argentina.“I
never made a copy that was the only one there was,” he recalled.When
Garcia Marquez came home from the post office, his wife looked around and said,
“We have no furniture left, we have nothing. We owe $5,000.”She
need not have worried; all 8,000 copies of the first run sold out in a week.U.S.
President Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading One
Hundred Years of Solitude while
in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.
“I
realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was
profoundly true and profoundly wise,” he said.Garcia
Marquez remained loyal to Castro even as other intellectuals lost patience with
the Cuban leader’s intolerance for dissent. The U.S. writer Susan Sontag
accused Garcia Marquez in 2005 of complicity by association in Cuban human
rights violations. But others defended him, saying Garcia Marquez had persuaded
Castro to help secure freedom for political prisoners.Garcia
Marquez’s politics caused the United States to deny him entry visas for years.
After a 1981 run-in with Colombia’s government in which he was accused of
sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla
group, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived most of the time for the rest of
this life.A bon vivant with an
impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would animatedly
recount long stories to guests, and occasionally unleash a quick temper when he
felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.
Mr.
Martin, the biographer, said the writer’s penchant for embellishment often
extended to his recounting of stories from his own life.From
childhood on, wrote Mr. Martin, “Garcia Marquez would have trouble with other people’s
questioning of his veracity.”Garcia
Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to draft
him to run for Colombia’s presidency, though he did get involved in
behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia’s government and
leftist rebels.In
1998, already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a
majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from his Nobel award.“I’m a
journalist. I’ve always been a journalist,” he told the AP at the
time. “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because
all the material was taken from reality.”Before
falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed
prodigiously to the magazine, including one article that denounced what he
considered the unfair political persecution of Mr. Clinton for sexual
adventures.Garcia
Marquez’s memory began to fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last
book, Memories of My Melancholy
Whores was
published in 2004.
Prof. John Kurakar
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