Mexico City,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 Maxico 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."
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.
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.
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 Nobal prize for literature, the
Swedish Academy hailing fiction "in which the fantastic and the realistic
are combined in a richly composed world of imaginationhe 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."
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.
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
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