A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
|
|||
|
Date
and Place of birth: |
|||
|
Life and Works: Latin-American author of novels and short stories, a central figure in the so-called magic realism movement in Latin-American literature. Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928 in the small town of Aracataca, situated in a tropical region of northern Colombia, between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea. He grew up with his maternal grandparent - his grandfather was a pensioned colonel from the civil war at the beginning of the century. Nicknamed Gabito, little Gabriel grew up as a quiet and shy lad, entranced by his grandfather's stories and his grandmother's superstitions. His grandfather died when he was eight years old, and due to his grandmother's increasing blindness, he went to live with his parents in Sucre, where his father was working as a pharmacist. Soon after he arrived in Sucre, it was decided that he should begin his formal schooling. He was sent to a boarding school in Barranquilla, a port city at the mouth of the Magdalena River. There, he acquired a reputation as being a shy boy who wrote humorous poems and drew cartoons. So serious and non-athletic was he that he was nicknamed "the Old Man" by his classmates. Gabriel Garcia Marquez began his career as a journalist for a series of liberal South American newspapers in the late 1940's. Although born into poverty, García Márquez studied law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and at the University of Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, working in Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Bogotá. In the late 1950s García Márquez was a foreign correspondent for the Bogotá daily El Espectador in Rome and Paris, returning to Colombia and then to Caracas as a journalist in 1958. From 1959 to 1961 he worked for the Cuban news agency La Prensa in Colombia, Havana, and New York City, and in the 1960s he worked as a screenwriter, journalist, and publicist in Mexico City. In 1959 García Márquez's first son, Rodrigo, was born, and the family moved to New York City, where he supervised the North American branch of Prensa Latina, where he labored under death threats from angry Americans and an increasing sense of disillusionment at the ideological rifts occurring in Cuba's communist party. He resigned his position later that year and moved his family to Mexico City, travelling through the South on a Faulknerian pilgrimage; he would be denied entrance into the USA again until 1971. García Márquez began writing short stories in the late 1940s. Faulkner and Sophocles would become his two biggest influences throughout the late forties and early fifties. Faulkner amazed him with his ability to reformulate his childhood into a mythical past, inventing a town and a county in which to house his prose. In Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha, García Márquez found the seeds for Macondo; and from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antigone he found the ideas of a plot revolving around society and the abuses of power. García Márquez began to grow dissatisfied with his earlier stories, believing them to be too abstracted from his true experiences. They "were simply intellectual elaborations, nothing to do with my reality." Faulkner said that a writer should write about what is close to him; and for years García Márquez had been struggling with his muse -- what did he really want to say? These thoughts would find form when he returned with his mother to his grandfather's house in Aracataca. Preparing it for sale, they found the house in quite ill repair, and yet the "haunted house" evoked such a swirl of memories in his head that he was overwhelmed. Indeed, the whole town seemed dead, frozen in time. He had already been sketching out a story based on his experiences there, a tentative novel to be called La casa, and although he felt that he was not yet ready to perfect it, he had found part of what he was after -- the sense of place. Inspired by his visit, upon returning to Barranquilla he wrote his first novella, Leaf Storm. With a plot device adapted from Antigone and set in a mythical town, the book was completed in a rapid rush of energy. The town was called "Macondo," which was the name of a banana plantation near Aracataca that he used to explore as a child. (Macondo means "banana" in the Bantu language.) Unfortunately in 1952 it was rejected by the first publisher he sent it to, and seized by self-doubt and self-criticism, he tossed it in a drawer. In 1955, while García Márquez was in Eastern Europe, it was rescued it from its hiding place in Bogotá by his friends and sent to a publisher. This time, it was published (La hojarasca, Leafstorm and Other Stories). El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961), which first appeared in the Colombian magazine Mito in 1958, relates the story of an aged war veteran whose service remains unrecognized by the country for which he fought. It was translated together with a collection of short stories, Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (1962), under the title No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968). During this period García Márquez also published La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour), a story of political repression in Macondo. Larger things came to Garcia Marquez in 1967. While suffering from writer's block several years earlier, the author suddenly had a vision of his next novel -- as he has said, the first chapter was as clear as if it had already been written. The idea was to tell the story of several generations of a Colombian family as his grandmother might have told it: supernatural occurrences and unbelievable events described with unblinking sincerity. And write he did. He wrote every day for eighteen months, consuming up to six packs of cigarettes a day. His friends started to call his smoke-filled room "the Cave of the Mafia," and after a while the whole community began helping out, as if they collectively understood that he was creating a masterpiece. Credit was extended, appliances loaned, debts forgiven. After nearly a year of work, García Márquez sent the first three chapters to Carlos Fuentes, who publicly declared: "I have just read eighty pages from a master." Towards the end of the novel, as yet unnamed, anticipation grew, and the buzz of success was in the air. As finishing touches, he placed himself, his wife, and his friends in the novel, and then discovered a name on the last page: Cien años de soledad. Finally he emerged from the Cave, grasping thirteen hundred pages in his hands, exhausted and almost poisoned from nicotine, over ten thousand dollars in debt, and perhaps only a few pages shy of a mental and physical breakdown. And yet, he was happy -- euphoric. In need of postage, he pawned a few more household implements and sent it off to the publisher in Buenos Aires. After eighteen months of seclusion, Garcia Marquez had produced his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has been called one of the greatest novels in history. It is also a history of Colombia and, on its highest level, a presentation of the myth and legend of human experience. The dense, convoluted style of this and other works recalls that of the American novelist William Faulkner. Solitude set the standard for a genre called Magical Realism, which Garcia Marquez wonderfully continued in his following works and which other writers have expanded. Lain-American life is particularly rich with the experiences that create Magical Realism: the reality of political oppression and proud familial obligations easily complement the magic of strong beliefs in the divine and supernatural. Many of Garcia Marquez's stories take place in the fictional town of Macondo, located in the banana-zone of Colombia. Macondo seems inspired by William Faulkner's Yoknaputawpha County, and is certainly based on Garcia Marquez's own village of Anacataca. With respect to the latter, the stories of Garcia Marquez raise questions about reality: what it is, what it can become, and whether it is the same for all people. In addition, each work is touched with deep melancholy. With Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez produced a volume of literary criticism, La novela en America Latina (1968). An episode in Cien años de Soledad gave rise to the collection of short stories titled La increíble y triste historia de la candida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (1972; Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories). Another series of stories was published as Ojos de perro azul (1972; Eyes of a Blue Dog). He later wrote El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch), a satire on Latin-American military dictators; and Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold), which examines the events surrounding a murder for honour in a Latin-American town. García Márquez's subsequent novels were El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera), a meditation on fidelity in romantic love; and El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth), a fictional account of the Latin-American liberator Simón Bolívar during the last months of his life. He moved to Barcelona in 1973 and in the later 1970s returned to Mexico. In 1977 he published Operación Carlota, a series of essays on Cuba's role in Africa. Ironically, although he claims to be quite good friends with Castro -- who even helped him edit Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- he spent the late seventies writing a "very harsh, very frank" book about the shortcomings of the Cuban Revolution and of life under Castro's regime. This book has not yet been published, and García Márquez has claimed that he is holding it until relations between Cuba and the United States are somewhat normalized. In 1982 he assisted a friend in publishing El olor de la guayaba, or The Fragrance of Guava, a book of conversations with his long time friend and colleague Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and in the same year he wrote Viva Sandino, a screenplay about the Sandanistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution. Politics, however, would be far from his mind for his next work of fiction, which would be a love story. Turning again to his rich past for inspiration and material, he reworked his parent's strange courtship into the form of a decade-spanning narrative. The story would be about two frustrated lovers and the long tome between their second courtship, and in 1986 Love in the Time of Cholera was unveiled to the anxious world. It was highly received, and there was no question that García Márquez had become a writer with universal appeal. By now one of the most famous writers in the world, he eased into a lifestyle of writing, teaching, and political activism. With residences in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Paris, Barcelona, and Barranquilla, he finished the decade by publishing The General in his Labyrinth in 1990, and two years later Strange Pilgrims was born. In 1994 he published Love and Other Demons, and in 2005 Memories of My Melancholy Whores. In addition to still being active at writing, Garcia Marquez also gives lectures, has written several essays, newspaper articles, and has recently published his memoirs Living to Tell the Tale. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
Main works in English:
Bibliography about Gabriel García Márquez
|
|
||
|
|||
Subscríbase a nuestro canal de noticias
Descargue aquí nuestros buscadores de libros