Gabriel García Márquez passes away

Sentinel

Bionic Poster
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/b...ining-tales-of-time-memory-and-love.html?_r=0

Excerpt:

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]Gabriel García Márquez, foreground, with Colombian journalist José Salgar in 2003. As a writer, Mr. García Márquez found the familiar in the fantastic. Credit Andres Reyes/FNPI, via Associated Press[/FONT]
[FONT=arial, sans-serif]The Magus of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez — who died [/FONT][FONT=arial, sans-serif]on Thursday[/FONT][FONT=arial, sans-serif] at his home in Mexico City, at the age of 87 — used his fecund imagination and exuberant sleight of hand to conjure the miraculous in his fiction: plagues of insomnia and forgetfulness, a cluster of magical grapes containing the secret of death, an all-night rain of yellow blossoms, a swamp of lilies oozing blood, a Spanish galleon marooned in a Latin American jungle, cattle born bearing the brand of their owner.[/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]Such images were not simply tokens of his endlessly inventive mind, but testaments to his all-embracing artistic vision, which recognized the extraordinary in the mundane, the familiar in the fantastic. In novels like “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Autumn of the Patriarch” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Mr. García Márquez mythologized the history of an entire continent, while at the same time creating a Rabelaisian portrait of the human condition as a febrile dream in which love and suffering and redemption endlessly cycle back on themselves on a Möbius strip in time.[/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]Transactions between the real and surreal, the ordinary and the fabulous, of course, are a signature device of the magical realism that flourished in the second half of the 20th century in places like Latin America, where the horrors and dislocations of history frequently exceeded the reach of logic, reason and conventional narrative techniques. What he called the “outsized reality” of Latin America’s history — including the period of civil strife in Colombia known as La Violencia, which claimed the lives of as many as 300,000 during the late 1940s and ’50s — demanded a means of expression beyond the rationalities of old-fashioned narrative realism.[/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]As Mr. García Márquez’s memoir “Living to Tell the Tale” made clear, however, his fascination with the phantasmagorical was as rooted in his own childhood and family history as it was in the civil wars and political upheavals of his country. His grandfather painted the walls of his workshop white so that the young boy, nicknamed Gabo, would have an inviting surface on which to draw and fantasize; his grandmother spoke of the visions she experienced everyday — the rocking chair that rocked alone, “the scent of jasmines from the garden” that “was like an invisible ghost.”[/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]His childhood home was in the remote town of Aracataca, a Wild West sort of place, subject to dry hurricanes, killing droughts, sudden floods, plagues of locusts and “a leaf storm” of fortune hunters, drawn by the so-called banana fever fomented there by the arrival of the United Fruit Company. Aracataca would provide the seeds for the imaginary town of Macondo in “Solitude,” just as Mr. García Márquez’s own sprawling family would help inspire the story of the prolific and amazing Buendía clan memorialized with such ardor in that novel. Macondo is a place where the miraculous and the monstrous are equally part of daily life, a place where the boundaries between reality and dreams are blurred. It is, at once, a state of mind, a mythologized version of Latin America and a reimagining of the author’s boyhood town through the prism of memory and nostalgia.[/FONT]


Full : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/b...ining-tales-of-time-memory-and-love.html?_r=0
 

kiki

Banned
the best spanish language writter of the XX CENTURY

Took narrative to another level.

I couldn´t stand him personaly, he was a fake, but when he was holding a pen and a paper, he was able of the greatest wonders.
 
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max

Legend
Ah, that's a shame. I liked his books and recommend particularly Love in the Time of Cholera.
 

kiki

Banned
The greatest writter of the whole XX century.He,Shakespeare,Tolstoi,Dante and maybe Goethe are on their own league.

Vargas LLosa and specially Octavio Paz were also excellent.
 

stringertom

Bionic Poster
Marquez was one of the writers I grew up reading.



Reading your comment, i thought r2473 has posted ! :)

r2's poasts confirm the theory espoused by Ollie that sufficient fat consumption is necessary for proper brain development through adolescence (see Feldman thread). Bacon is King!

There must have been lots of pigs in Macondo, no?
 

kiki

Banned
like in Shakespeare case, those guys were so good that they even sound great when translated into another language other than their own.

But of course, it is a big difference to read Shakespeare in his time´s english than in any other language.And the same happens with Garcia Marquez.
 

kiki

Banned
What set GGM apart is his backgorund, a solid background as journalist.

Gabo was the master of novelizing real facts or sequences of real facts.

Once, Omar Torrijos said to him " Yes, that is the way we are" commenting at how he had described in El Otoño del Patriarca the basic features of Latin american dictators.
 

ollinger

G.O.A.T.
Isn't he the guy who knocked Dolgopolov out of Monte Carlo earlier this week? (Ooops, sorry, that was Guillermo Garcia-Lopez)
 
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