We are left by Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian writer and journalist whose stories of love and seductive desire have brought Latin America into the hearts and lives of millions of readers, putting magical realism on the map of literature.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
He left us Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian writer and journalist whose stories of love and seductive desire have brought Latin America into the hearts and lives of millions of readers, putting the magical realism on the literature map.
The author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love at the Time of Cholera He passed away Thursday, aged 87, at his home in Mexico City. He had returned there from the hospital last week after a bout of pneumonia. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982, García Márquez was a prolific writer who began his career as a journalist and spent his entire life between literature and political engagement.
Among other things, he became the spokesperson, with his profession and his commitment, of struggles for freedom and justice. He strongly challenged the death penalty and strongly supported disarmament, as well as denounced the US drug repression.
This and much more was Marquez, known affectionately by friends and fans as "Gabo", who was the best known and most loved author of South America. So much so that, in March 2007, his Hundred Years of Solitude was voted, during the IV International Congress of the Spanish Language in Cartagena, as second most important work in Spanish ever written (the first is Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes).
HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE - Tells the story of seven Colombian generations of the Buendía in the imaginary village of Macondo, which was actually his languid hometown town, Aracataca, near the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Here Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927 and grew up together with his maternal grandparents. In the novel, they come together miraculous and supernatural events with details of daily life and political realities of Latin America. Characters are visited by ghosts. Everything is wrapped in a strange insomnia. A child is born with a pig's tail and a priest levitates above the earth. At times comical and obscene, at other times tragic, it has sold over 30 million copies and has been published in dozens of languages, helping to fuel the boom in Latin American fiction.
Garcia Marquez, a stocky man with a magnetic smile, thick mustache and curly hair, said he found inspiration by drawing on childhood memories and her grandmother's stories, steeped in folklore and superstition.
A SENSITIVE MAN - When he worked, he woke up before dawn every day, read a book, leafed through the papers and then wrote for four hours. His wife put a yellow rose on his desk. In his last public appearance, for his 87th birthday, he walked out of the house to smile and wave supporters, right with a yellow rose in the lapel of her gray dress.
The President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, one of the many public figures to pay homage to him, greets him with a Tweet: "a thousand years of loneliness and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time"
A thousand years of loneliness and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time! Solidarity and condolences to Gaba and family
– Juan Manuel Santos (@JuanManSantos) April 17, 2014
But the best tribute to remember is to keep going to be ferried to these particular places, where the miraculous and the real converge. To indulge in this extravagant flight of fantasy. See you in Macondo, Gabo!
Roberta Ragni
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