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| ALTERNATIVE CROP OF XLAT301 - FILE - This undated file photo of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez is seen in an unknown location. Marquez died Thursday April 17, 2014 at his home in Mexico City. Garcia Marquez's magical realist novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality. |
MEXICO CITY
(AP) -- Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating
fiction from the fatalism, fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world
that set his mind churning as a child growing up on Colombia's Caribbean
coast.
One of the most revered and
influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America's charm
and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became
the best-known practitioner of "magical realism," a blending of
fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made the
extraordinary seem almost routine.
In his
works, clouds of yellow butterflies precede a forbidden lover's arrival.
A heroic liberator of nations dies alone, destitute and far from home.
"A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," as one of his short stories is
called, is spotted in a muddy courtyard.
Garcia
Marquez's own epic story ended Thursday, at age 87, with his death at
his home in southern Mexico City, according to two people close to the
family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the
family's privacy.
Known to millions simply as
"Gabo," Garcia Marquez was widely seen as the Spanish language's most
popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. His
extraordinary literary celebrity spawned comparisons with Mark Twain and
Charles Dickens.
His flamboyant and
melancholy works - among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," "Love in
the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch" - outsold everything
published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel "One Hundred
Years of Solitude" sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25
languages.
With writers including Norman
Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early practitioner of
the literary nonfiction that would become known as New Journalism. He
became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial
works of narrative non-fiction that included the "Story of A
Shipwrecked Sailor," the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10
days. He was also a scion of the region's left.
Shorter
pieces dealt with subjects including Venezuela's larger-than-life
president, Hugo Chavez, while the book "News of a Kidnapping" vividly
portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the
social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of
its elite. In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation
for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the
standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.
But for so many inside and outside the region, it was his novels that became synonymous with Latin America itself.
When
he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described the
region as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty,
of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more,
singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets,
warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we
have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has
been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."
Gerald
Martin, Garcia Marquez's semi-official biographer, told The Associated
Press that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was "the first novel in which
Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated
their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition,
their grand propensity for failure."
The
Spanish Royal Academy, the arbiter of the language, celebrated the
novel's 40th anniversary with a special edition. It had only done so for
just one other book, Cervantes' "Don Quijote."
Like
many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of
letters. He became a hero to the Latin American left as an early ally of
Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington's
interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable visage, set off by a
white mustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly recognizable.
Unable to receive a U.S. visa for years due to his politics, he was
nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill Clinton and
Francois Mitterrand among his presidential friends.
Garcia
Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the
Caribbean coast on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children
of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a
wandering homeopathic pharmacist who fathered at least four children
outside of his marriage.
Just after their
first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents
and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez's father opened the
first of a series of homeopathic pharmacies that would invariably fail,
leaving them barely able to make ends meet.
Garcia
Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather,
a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that
hastened Colombia's loss of the Panamanian isthmus.
His
grandparents' tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez's fiction
and Aracataca became the model for Macondo, the village surrounded by
banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where "One
Hundred Years of Solitude" is set.
"I have
often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories
and so on, almost since I was born," Garcia Marquez once told an
interviewer. "Ever since I could speak."
Garcia
Marquez's parents continued to have children, and barely made ends
meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just
outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader,
favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Garcia
Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947,
mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary
editor wrote that "Colombia's younger generation has nothing to offer in
the way of good literature anymore."
His
father insisted he study law but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated
himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious and Garcia Marquez recalled
his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his
bedraggled appearance that: "I thought you were a beggar."
Garcia
Marquez wrote in 1955 about a sailor, washed off the deck of a
Colombian warship during a storm, who reappeared weeks later at the
village church where his family was offering a Mass for his soul.
"The
Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" uncovered that the destroyer was
carrying cargo, the cargo was contraband, and the vessel was overloaded.
The authorities didn't like it," Garcia Marquez recalled.
Several months later, while he was in Europe, dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla's government closed El Espectador.
In
exile, he toured the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955
to study cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived
among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American
dictatorships of the day.
Garcia Marquez
returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a neighbor from
childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and
Gonzalo, a graphic designer.
Garcia Marquez's
writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views,
themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near
Aracataca of banana workers striking against the United Fruit Company,
which later became Chiquita. He was also greatly influenced by the
assassination two decades later of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanizing
leftist presidential candidate.
The killing
would set off the "Bogotazo," a weeklong riot that destroyed the center
of Colombia's capital and which Castro, a visiting student activist,
also lived through.
Garcia Marquez would sign
on to the young Cuban revolution as a journalist, working in Bogota and
Havana for its news agency Prensa Latina, then later as the agency's
correspondent in New York.
Garcia Marquez
wrote the epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in 18 months, living
first off loans from friends and then by having his wife pawn their
things, starting with the car and furniture.
By
the time he finished writing in September 1966, their belongings had
dwindled to an electric heater, a blender and a hairdryer. His wife then
pawned those remaining items so that he could mail the manuscript to a
publisher in Argentina.
"I never made a copy - that was the only one there was," he recalled.
When
Garcia Marquez came home from the post office, his wife looked around
and said, "We have no furniture left, we have nothing. We owe $5,000."
She need not have worried; all 8,000 copies of the first run sold out in a week.
President
Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading "One
Hundred Years of Solitude" while in law school and not being able to put
it down, not even during classes.
"I realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise," he said.
Garcia
Marquez remained loyal to Castro even as other intellectuals lost
patience with the Cuban leader's intolerance for dissent. The U.S.
writer Susan Sontag accused Garcia Marquez in 2005 of complicity by
association in Cuban human rights violations. But others defended him,
saying Garcia Marquez had persuaded Castro to help secure freedom for
political prisoners.
Garcia Marquez's politics
caused the United States to deny him entry visas for years. After a
1981 run-in with Colombia's government in which he was accused of
sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan
guerrilla group, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived most of the
time for the rest of this life.
A bon vivant
with an impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would
animatedly recount long stories to guests, and occasionally unleash a
quick temper when he felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.
Martin,
the biographer, said the writer's penchant for embellishment often
extended to his recounting of stories from his own life.
From childhood on, wrote Martin, "Garcia Marquez would have trouble with other people's questioning of his veracity."
Garcia
Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to
draft him to run for Colombia's presidency, though he did get involved
in behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia's
government and leftist rebels.
In 1998,
already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a
majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from
his Nobel award.
"I'm a journalist. I've
always been a journalist," he told the AP at the time. "My books
couldn't have been written if I weren't a journalist because all the
material was taken from reality."
Before
falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed
prodigiously to the magazine, including one article that denounced what
he considered the unfair political persecution of Clinton for sexual
adventures.
Garcia Marquez's memory began to
fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last book, "Memories of My
Melancholy Whores," was published in 2004.
He
is survived by his wife, his two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and
Gonzalo, a graphic designer, seven brothers and sisters and one
half-sister.
