Author Study: Gabriel García Márquez Curated by Emma Ferguson '18
1. Who was Marquez?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in 1927, was known affectionately to the Latin American populace as Gabo. He is known for two major accomplishments: kicking off the "Latin American Boom", a period during the 1960s to 80s when Latin American literature came into prominence on the world stage, and being the "Father of Magical Realism", a genre in which fantastical events are described realistically. Marquez was heavily political throughout his life, and his works often sent messages pertaining to Latin America's political climate. For these contributions, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982.
"The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982 was awarded to Gabriel García Márquez 'for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts'"(The Nobel Foundation).
"[Gabriel Garcia Marquez is] the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote" (Pablo Neruda).
“It was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
Love in the Time of Cholera
"Fermina," he said, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love."
The Autumn of the Patriarch
"Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur."
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother
"Erendira had not heard him. She was running into the wind, swifter than a deer, and no voice of this world could stop her. Without turning her head she ran past the salt-peter pits, the talcum craters, the torpor of the shacks, until the natural science of the sea ended and the desert began, but she still kept on running with the gold vest beyond the arid winds and the never-ending sunsets and she was never heard of again nor was the slightest trace of her misfortune ever found."