Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Born in 1927 in Aracataca, Columbia. Died in 2014.
Mini-Bio
Gabriel was raised by his paternal grandparents. According to him, they were the perfect mix of realism and fantastical. He spent his days with his grandfather — a colonel in the 1,000 Days War and a liberal who fought the conservatives of Columbia. He encouraged Gabriel to become a journalist. He spent his nights with his grandmother, Dona, who believed in ghosts, premonitions, and superstitions — all the women in his village did. He claimed only authors from the Americas dealt with the natural world. He is known most for his use of magical realism, symbolized in a single sentence from One Hundred Years of Solitude:
“As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living-room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs… and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread.”
Won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature for One Hundred Years of Solitude
Four links:
1. Interview — The Paris Review, 1981
“I think that writing is very difficult, but so is any job carefully executed. What is a privilege, however, is to do a job to your own satisfaction. I think that I’m excessively demanding of myself and others because I cannot tolerate errors; I think that it is a privilege to do anything to a perfect degree.”
2. Interview with translator Rabassa — Vox.com, 2014
“A word that Gabo enjoys throwing about in a lot of his writing as an expletive but more often than not as a descriptive term is mierda, excrement. [.…] It was a favorite word of the novel’s unnamed patriarch and as such it was absolutely essential that it appear in English in its correct earthy and expressive translation.”
3. The first eleven minutes of Witch Writing
“Since I was born, I had known I would be a writer. I wanted to be a writer. I had the will, the ability, the courage to be a writer. I have never stopped writing and never imagined doing anything else. Though, I never believed I could live on it. But I was ready to die for it.”
4. Salman Rushdie on Marquez — The Telegraph, 2014
“The trouble with the term “magic realism”, el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, “magic”, without paying attention to the other half, “realism”. But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works..”
