Translated into almost every language, Gabriel García Márquez, author of the cult classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, sold over 30 million books worldwide. A pioneer of « magic realism » and a veritable icon in his homeland, the Colombian writer, who passed away in April 2014, was one of the last giants of Latin American letters
A legend of Colombian literatture
Have you already experienced One Hundred Years of Solitude? Yes, we’re talking about Gabriel García Márquez’s novel. Anyone who has ever read the Colombian writer’s masterpiece, first published in 1967, will have indelible memories of it.
How can we forget? This universal fresco, which made him a household name, tells the virtuoso story of a six-generation family condemned to live… a hundred years of solitude, by the prophecy of a gypsy. « One hundred years of solitude is the best Spanish-language novel written since Don Quixote, » wrote Pablo Neruda, another giant of South American letters.
A masterpiece of « magic realism », a literary genre that blends elements of historical and geographical reality with the marvellous and supernatural, this incredible Colombian epic has captivated tens of millions of readers worldwide. The novel, not devoid of humour, transports readers through wars and conflicts to an imaginary place: Macondo, a fictional village that recurs in García Márquez’s work.
Is Macondo really imaginary? It’s obvious that the place has a lot in common with a village well known to Gabriel García Márquez: Aracataca(1). It was in the tropical atmosphere of this northern Colombian town, surrounded by banana plantations, that Gabriel García Márquez drew much of his fruitful inspiration throughout his life.
He was born in 1927, the year of the massacre in the Aracataca region of banana plantation workers in revolt against the bosses. « Gabo » or « Gabito », as he was known, was the eldest of eleven children, the son of a telegraph operator and a young girl from the local bourgeoisie. His colorful, anti-clerical grandfather, known as the « Colonel », was a veteran of the Thousand Days War, a liberal who fought unsuccessfully against the conservative Colombian government at the turn of the 20th century. His superstitious grandmother, who imagined her house populated by ghosts, full of omens and premonitions, had the gift of« treating extraordinary things as if they were completely natural« , he would say. A fertile family ground for creating a world of his own.
Chronicle of a success foretold
From 1936 onwards, the young man lived with his parents between Sucre and Barranquilla, where he attended primary school with the Jesuits. He received a scholarship and passed his baccalaureate in Bogotá in 1946, before abandoning his law studies. Moving between the capital and Cartagena, he led a solitary existence. He decided to go into journalism, while continuing to pursue his ambition to become a writer. It was thanks to the press that this admirer of Hemingway, Joyce and Faulkner published his first stories, such as La Troisième Résignation and Récit d’un naufragé. In 1955, he finally published his first novel, Des feuilles dans la bourrasque.A failure: only a few hundred copies were sold, after being ignored by publishers for a long time.
It was there that he decided to leave for Europe, as a correspondent for the newspaper El Espectador. But the Colombian daily was soon shut down by dictator Rojas Pinilla. These were lean times. His biographers have told of his life as a pauper in Paris, barely able to afford a metro ticket.
Back in Latin America as a young married man, he flew to Cuba – for which he had set up a local branch of the new Prensa Latina news agency in Bogotá – and then on to Mexico. It was there, on the road to Acapulco, that this unforgettable sentence came to mind:« Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would recall that distant afternoon when his father had taken him to discover ice. » It’s the famous incipit of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that took him twelve months to write – and, according to legend, consumed 30,000 cigarettes. Gabriel García Márquez was on his way to fame, and for Spain he was the symbol of the Spanish-American literary boom, alongside Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and Mexican Carlos Fuentes.
A cult author in his own lifetime
Rarely does he become a cult figure in his own lifetime. At the risk of going astray:« The real García Márquez disappeared forever under the weight of celebrity« , analyzed Gerald Martin, author of a seminal biography on García Márquez(3).
Superstar, but faithful to his revolutionary ideas, the author invited himself into the political debate, deciding to grow a beard as long as Pinochet remained in power(4), slapping a kiss on François Mitterrand, while remaining a fervent supporter of the Castro regime. He had the good sense to leave pure politics out of his writings, as shown by the novels to follow, bursting with violence and irony, marked by the themes of war, death, love and solitude.
Text by Hugues Derouard
the Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold or Love in the Time of Cholera… All were hailed by the critics. The ultimate accolade came with the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him in 1982, several years before he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. His latest works are Mémoire de mes putains tristes and Vivre pour la raconter, a collection of memories. The titles of these two books are ironic in retrospect, given that García Márquez suffered from amnesia at the end of his life and, according to those close to him, could not even remember the titles of his books. Or perhaps this was just another ruse, given that the man who knew how to draw the marvellous from everyday life always had a talent for blurring the lines.« Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life« , the indomitable Gabo once said. He died on April 17, 2014 at his home in Mexico City. Tributes poured in from all over the world, and the Colombian government declared three days of national mourning. (1) The similarity between García Márquez’s native village and Macondo is such that Aracata has unofficially been renamed Aracata-Macondo. This name is modestly underlined by the legend « Tierra Nobel » (Nobel Land) on the signs that mark the entrance to the town. (2) The Thousand Days War (Guerra de los Mil Días) was Colombia’s most important civil war. It lasted 1,130 days between October 17, 1899 and November 21, 1902 (hence its name), and led to the independence of Panama (until then a department of Colombia) in 1903. (3) Gabriel García Márquez, une vie, by Gerald Martin, published by Grasset, 2009. (4) GGM’s account of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile
