As a young man, he believed his bad luck with women and money was “congenital and irremediable.”
But he did not care, because he believed he did not need luck to write well, and did not care about glory and money, or old age. For he was sure that he was going to die very young and in the street. Paid a pittance for material he wrote in Colombian newspapers in Cartagena, and in Barranquilla, where he lived in a garret of a brothel, his eye was unwaveringly focused on a literary career and he was avidly reading and learning from Faulkner, Hemingway, Dickens and Dostoevsky, and later from one of this country’s greatest writers, Jalisco’s Juan Rulfo.
One of his newspaper articles exposing official corruption so angered the country’s dictator, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, that he fled to Europe. There, he became a foreign correspondent for his paper, El Espectador, and then for El Independente until Rojas Pinilla shut it down.
He was soon in Caracas, Venezuela writing for El Momento, and just before having a falling out with the paper’s owner, he traveled carefully to Barranquilla to marry a former schoolmate, Mercedes Barcha. Happily, she turned out to be as determined as her new husband. They eventually settled in Mexico City.
The man, of course, was Gabriel “Gabo” Garcia Marquez, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who died April 17 in his Mexico City home.
Garcia Marquez had come to Mexico possessed by the long-held desire to find a way to write a novel based on his grandparents’ Colombian home and their well-told tales, including his grandfather’s adventures as a colonel in Colombia’s “Thousand Days’ War.”There were a number of reasons why he liked Mexico. Among them was the fact that it was here on a day in 1965 while driving his family to Acapulco that exactly the right tone, the right path for returning to his time with his grandparents occurred to him. He has said that he turned the car around, rushed home and began writing. He sold the car so his family would have money to live on as he wrote. He wrote and wrote, but the novel grew larger and larger. His wife negotiated credit for food, for rent, for all the family’s expenses. Eighteen months later he stopped writing. “Is it really finished?” asked his wife. “We owe 12,000 dollars.”
Once the novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” was published in Spanish in 1967, the family never owed money again. Garcia Marquez waited until acclaimed U.S. translator Gregory Rabassa was free, and in 1970 a lyrical English “Solitude” sent already huge sales of the book into the stratosphere.
Garcia Marquez did not invent “magic realism” and wasn’t particularly fond of the term. When he talked about the novel’s events, he spoke of “surrealism,” saying it was on the loose everywhere, certainly in Mexico, and he provided abundant examples to illustrate this.
People who lose their breath over the word “magic” tend to drop the word “realism” by the roadside, keen-reading critics note. Such dazzling events and people had appeared in Mexico and elsewhere long before. It was a popular term in Germany at one time. And famed Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) spoke of lo real marvilloso – marvelous reality.
While he has never shaken off the magic realism tag, Garcia Marquez’s advantage has been that he is a journalist used to pinning words to facts. For if what he did was true magic it would be mere whimsy, points out celebrated author Salman Rushdie, for if anything can happen, “nothing has effect.”
Garcia Marquez was as equally blunt when a friend mentioned that many foreign readers spoke mostly of the magic in his work, but not much about its reality. “Reality isn’t limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs,” he responded quickly.
When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, it did not noticeably slow his production. He immediately began writing what many critics feel is his most enduring novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” published in 1985. Then came “The General in his Labyrinth” in 1989, followed by “Of Love and Other Demons” in 1994. In 2004 came his last novella, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” which he clearly knew would ignite controversy. Its 91-year-old protagonist wishes to give himself a gift: sexual relations with a 14-year-old prostitute who is selling her virginity to aid her family. This is a story going far back in history, back to the Book of the Kings, among many others. However, in this case, instead of an anticipated sexual adventure the protagonist discovers love for the first time in his life.
Before this last novella, in 1999, the author was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He went to a hospital in Los Angeles, where chemotherapy treatments served to put the cancer into remission. This experience prompted Garcia Marquez to put all other matters aside: “I locked myself in to write everyday without interruption.” Three years later he published “Living to Tell the Tale,” the first volume in what was a planned trilogy of memoirs.
In December 2008 at the Guadalajara International Book Fair he said that writing had worn him out. In May of that year, the UK Guardian reported that he was finishing a new novel that would be published at the end of the year. In April 2009, his agent Carmen Balcells told a Chilean newspaper that he was unlikely to write again. In December 2012, his brother Jaime announced that Garcia Marquez was suffering from dementia. Early this month, the author was hospitalized in Mexico City with infection in his lungs and urinary tract, and suffering from dehydration. Garcia Marquez died of pneumonia April 17.
April 22, the presidents of Colombia and Mexico attended a formal ceremony in Mexico City, where Garcia Marquez had lived for more than three decades. A funeral cortege took the urn containing his ashes from his house to the Palace of Fine Arts, where the ceremony was held. Thousands attended. Earlier, residents in his home town of Aracataca in Colombia’s Caribbean region held a symbolic funeral.
Garcia Marquez published six novels, four novellas, five collections of short stories, plus seven volumes of non-fiction.