Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez BIO ON THE AUTHOR

3. BIO • Gabriel GarcíaMárquez was born in Aracataca, in the "banana zone" of Colombia, the first child of Luisa SantiagaMárquez, the daughter of Colonel NicolásMárquez, and Gabriel EligioGarcía, an itinerant homeopath and pharmacist. • Soon after his birth, his parents left him to be reared by his grandparents and three aunts. • At the age of fifteen, he was sent to the Liceo de Zipaquirá, a high school for the gifted. He then studied law and journalism at the National University in Bogóta and at the University of Cartagena. While a law student in Bogota, he dressed like the celebrated singer and actor Carlos Gardel and frequented brothels. • In 1958 he married Mercedes BarchaPardo, the daughter of a pharmacist and granddaughter of an Egyptian immigrant. They had two children, Rodrigo, who became a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer. • Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been suffering from lymphatic cancer and is receiving treatment. He remains active in Latin American politics.

4. One of his most famous reportages was an account of a young sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, who was swept off the Columbian destroyer Caldas into the Caribbean Sea. GarcíaMárquez was an European correspond in Rome and Paris for the newspaper El Espectador in 1955, but lost his post when the newspaper was closed down by the dictator Rojas Pinilla.

5. Three important events happened for Marquez in 1981. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor, the highest decoration France gives to a foreigner. After a warning that the Colombian military had accused him of conspiring with guerrillas, he was forced to seek asylum at the Mexican Embassy in Bogota. Finally, he published Chronicles of Death Fortold. In 1982, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He used the money to start a daily newspaper, El Otro, in Colombia, after the Colombian government promised him that he would be safe in Colombia.

6. A LINK TO THE BOOK. • Gabriel Garcia Marquez has many trademarks in his novels. For instance, both Chronicle of a Death Foretold and One Hundred Years of Solitude start out in medias res, or in the middle of things, with a declaration that their protagonists are going to die in the novel. Also, Marquez often uses events and characters from his own life in his books. For example, Mercedes Barcha, his wife, is in Chronicle of a Death Foretold under her own name as the narrator's young wife. The narrator even says he proposed to her as soon as she finished primary school, much like the real-life Mercedes Barcha. Luisa Santiaga is the name of both the narrator's mother in the book and Marquez's mother in reality. Marquez's brother is named Luis Enrique; both the narrator and Marquez have a sister who is a nun.

7. BACKGROUNDon Magical Realism • The term "magical realism" was first introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic, who considered magical realism an art category.  To him, it was a way of representing and responding to reality and pictorially depicting the enigmas of reality.  In Latin America in the 1940s, magical realism was a way to express the realistic American mentality and create an autonomous style of literature.

8. MAGICAL REALSIM • A literary mode rather than a distinguishable genre, magical realism aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites.  For instance, it challenges polar opposites like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present.  Magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. • Magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy".  The presence of the supernatural in magical realism is often connected to the primeval or "magical’ Indian mentality, which exists in conjunction with European rationality.  According to Ray Verzasconi, as well as other critics, magical realism is "an expression of the New World reality which at once combines the rational elements of the European super-civilization, and the irrational elements of a primitive America."  Gonzalez Echchevarria believes that magical realism offers a world view that is not based on natural or physical laws nor objective reality.  However, the fictional world is not separated from reality either.

10. LATIN AMERICAN BOOM • The Latin American Boom (Boom latinoamericano) was a literary moment of the 60s and 70s when the work of a group of young latinAmerican novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom Is most closely associated with Julio Cortazar of Argentina, Carlos fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel Garcia Marques of Columbia

11. The sudden success of the Boom authors was in large part because their works were among the first Latin American novels to be published in Europe, Latin American novelist became world famous through their writing and their advocacy of political and social action, and because many of them had the good fortune to reach markets and audiences beyond Latin America through translation and travel- and sometimes through exile.

12. WRAP UP • Gabriel Garcia Marquez is undoubtedly the most internationally renowned of the boom writers. He started out as a journalist and has written many acclaimed non-fiction and short stories; his earliest published writings were short stories which appeared in Bogota El Espectador newspaper in the 1940s. He has achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread literary world. He experimented with more or less traditional approaches to reality, so that “the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with deadpan expression” Garcia Marquez is now considered of on the most significant authors of the 20th century, as is attested by his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.