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Gabriel García Márquez, Literary Pioneer, Dies at 87
- kartikkumar 13y agoA deeply thoughtful literary great, to rank among the likes of Dickens, Cervantes and Dostoyevsky in my mind. Love in the Time of Cholera changed me, just like Crime and Punishment did. It affected me more than any other book has. At the time of my life when I read it, I felt that it spoke to my personal sensibilities. I followed that up with Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which I honestly think is his absolute masterpiece. Gracias Señor García Márquez.
- paul_f 13y agoCan someone provide a quick summary of what was it that made Marquez so prominent? I had not know much about him at all. FYI, if like me, you have trouble accessing the article, and using Chrome, right-click and open in an incognito window.
- pmelendez 13y agoHe is the maximum exponent (and arguably the creator) of the genre "Magic Realism" and quoting wikipedia: "where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment" [0] He got most of his fame from "One hundred years of solitude". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism
- danso 13y agoHis best known work is "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which sold 20 million copies. Or, as the OP describes it: > The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” It's an excellent book, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. That said, I'm kind of surprised (but pleased) to see that his passing was noted by HN readers.
- bri3d 13y ago"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" also appears in a lot of US advanced (IB/AP) high school English classes, which I suspect many HN users took.
- ch4s3 13y ago"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) is a beautiful piece of fiction, and hugely influential. When I first read it, suddenly a number of other books and films seemed to spring from this single point of inspiration.
- infinitebattery 13y agoThat is correct! I read that novel about a month ago, in my IB English class.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- stplsd 13y agoHe's “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops” He opened the flood gates of saccharine magic realism which haunts Latin America literature to this day.
- ulisesrmzroche 13y agoOh chill out buddy, #1, you're being a jerk. #2, you're wrong, Borges had more to do with it, but really it was there long before them anyway.
- slurry 13y agoDisagree, but upvoted. Magical realism in general and Garcia Marquez in particular are more critically problematic than many realize. I don't think this thread should gloss over that entirely, even if the tone of objection is unlovely.
- ulisesrmzroche 13y agoNah, you're both wrong, and what's worse, you're holding strawmans. Not the time and place for this, my dudes.
- ballard 13y agoYup. Speaking ill of the dead is awful.
- Myrmornis 13y agoAgree that this thread should not gloss over the gigabytes of rubbish written by undergrads in response to "magical realism", and what's worse, the person-years wasted by a devotion to the arts inspired by a combination of a childish attraction to this sort of stuff and the spurious academic credentials accorded to it.
- frozenport 13y agoHe isn't responsible for his imitators!
- diego_moita 13y agoFor me there a couple of things that stand out on him: * A builder of great narratives. His best books typically go through several little stories with a common unifying theme. * A sharp builder of catchy phrases. This works much better in Spanish, he was a master of rhythm, but you can get in English too. * A builder of great images. It is impossible to make a decent movie of the scenes he describes. It would be like dissecting an hummingbird.
- jacques_chester 13y agoI think he was, in no small part, popular for the same reason that Sean Penn got his second Oscar for Milk: politics. Marquez thumbed the eye of colonialism. And he wrote a bunch of rolling sentences with colourful imagery. But I don't see why he deserves the Nobel Prize over, to take a glaring example, Borges. Except that Borges didn't really write anything politically fashionable, as opposed to possessing any other literary virtue. So. Politics.
- leephillips 13y agoThis is not a comment on Marquez, who probably deserved his Nobel, but: everyone knows that the literature Prize is thoroughly politicized, perhaps as much as that supreme expression of European political sentiment, the Nobel Peace Prize. Just reflect for a moment how it is that the writer of English sometimes described as the most important since Shakespeare never won: Nabokov's unwavering opposition to Communist tyranny and disdain for literature as a vehicle for political propaganda disqualified him.
- monjaro 13y agoThis is utter nonsense. García Márquez wrote some of the most compelling and beautiful stories of the 20th century. Borges wrote the literary equivalent of late night stoner conversations, covering up a lack of substance with erudition. I don't deny that the Nobel Prize can be political, but García Márquez was one of the most deserving recipients.
- CamperBob2 13y agoYeah, that must be why entire philosophy courses are based on Borges. Stoner lit.
- monjaro 13y agoI was considering phrasing my comment as "conversations between stoned philosophy students", so yes, that sounds about right. Not to mention the fact that a philosophy course about Borges will likely be examining the work of the philosophers Borges was referencing. I've yet to see anyone make the claim that Borges originated any of the important philosophical ideas in his stories. Edit: Just to back this up a little more, here is a quote from the man himself: "But I wonder if they are my ideas. Because really I am not a thinker. I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don’t think that I’m a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps." http://denisdutton.com/jorge_luis_borges_interview.htm http://denisdutton.com/jorge_luis_borges_interview.htm
- e3pi 13y ago“By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies, and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was looking for, and he was glad to know it. "Bravo, lionlady," he said when he left. "We have killed the tiger.” “To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.” “He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.” “[The captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love and was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.” Fermina Daza: "No. Forget it."
- rjtavares 13y ago“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice." Best opening line of a book ever. RIP.
- ramses 13y agoThat line, that one opening line. Once I read it, it was instantly etched into my brain. I read the book in Spanish. It was the first magic realism book that I read, and also the first book authored by Márquez that I read. I had no idea what the book was about, but that opening line hooked me, and I could not put down the book afterwards. Unsurprisingly, I tried to read everything else written by Márquez :-)
- sahhhm 13y agoNot to be pedantic, but the Rabassa translation reads: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
- psychometry 13y agoPrefacing pedantry with "not to be pedantic" doesn't make what you're about to say not pedantic.
- sahhhm 13y agoFair enough. My intention was to avoid attacking the original quotation while still maintaining the actual translation.
- omegant 13y agoI agred this translation gives a better idea of how old timer sounds the original.
- guelo 13y ago"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía habría de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo." I think rjtavares' quote is more faithful. Except for "conocer", it should be "know ice" or maybe "know about ice", not "see" or "discover". But the thing about translating poetic literature is that the translator also needs to be a poet.
- KhalilK 13y agoHis books were part of my adolescence, but "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was the essence of my formal education, I am sad he died but I am utterly glad he's lived.
- stplsd 13y agoI am indifferent that he died and I hate to say this, but it should have been better to literature if he never existed as writer.
- DonGateley 13y agoIf you so "hate to say this" why have you said it twice in this thread?
- russell 13y ago"One Hundred Years of Solitude" was the only book that everyone in my family ever read, me, my wife and my three kids. "Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience." from the article. But the article doesnt begin to do the book justice. The mythology is Colombian but it all is real to the reader. It is very worthwnile to read One Hundred Years along with a literary biography of Marquez. It was a wonderful experience for me. BTW my taste is purely science fiction.
- chimeracoder 13y agoI read six of Garcia Márquez's stories in school - my favorite was "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"[0] ("El Ahogado más Hermoso del Mundo"). If you're looking to get a taste of his writing but don't have time to read an entire book, this short story captures his style very well. In a similar vein is "An Old Man with Very Enormous Wings" [1] ("Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes"), which was referenced in R.E.M's music video for "Losing My Religion[2] [0] https://hutchinson-page.wikispaces.com/file/view/The_Most_Handsome_Drowned_Man.pdf https://hutchinson-page.wikispaces.com/file/view/The_Most_Ha... [1] http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MarquezManwithWings.htm http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/Mar... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if-UzXIQ5vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if-UzXIQ5vw
- ch4s3 13y agoAnd now we may never know why Mario Vargas Llosa punched him in the face.
- gone35 13y agoWell we kind of know some details at least[1]: Mario strayed. He fell in love with a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he met while travelling. He left his wife and moved to Stockholm. Distraught, his wife Patricia went to see her husband's best friend, Gabriel. After discussing the matter with his wife, Mercedes, he advised Patricia to divorce Mario. And then he consoled her. No one else quite knows what form this consolation took... Eventually Mario returned to his wife, who told him of Gabriel's advice to her, and of his consolation. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/10/the-nobel-is-the-best-revenge.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/10/the-nobe...
- ch4s3 13y agoI actually asked Llosa about it when he spoke at my college about seven years ago. His reply was something along the line of, "I don't talk about that."
- simonsarris 13y agoOh my. A paragon of magical realism and my second favorite author. Rest in peace. Liking storytelling alone is sometimes not enough to like Marquez, you have to love language too. He uses (some might say abuses) language to impact his storytelling, often using incredibly long, convoluted sentences to weave his narrative. It can be hard to follow, sometimes intentionally, but I find it enormously satisfying to read and follow along with his brain. Like slowly drinking a maple syrup of words. One of the best examples is the first 15 or so[1] pages of Autumn of the Patriarch[2], where the narrator winds this thread of what has happened slowly, using sentences that span pages, until you realize a shift from what has happened to a sort of what is about to happen. Then a fist slams on the table and the realization strikes you that the first part of the description was a kind of set up, this beautiful ruse. I wish I could be more descriptive but it would give away the delight. It's a great book about terror and despotism. Marquez is not the kind of thing you can read in a noisy environment. At least I can't. I adore him so much. I could write a eulogy for days. If you've never read him, please take a moment to read one of my favorite short stories, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings http://simonsarris.com/lit/a-very-old-man-with-enormous-wings http://simonsarris.com/lit/a-very-old-man-with-enormous-wing... (I've hosted a copy of it (and many more short stories) for ages because most of the copies on the web are plagued with ads and miserable formatting) If One Hundred Years of Solitude seems too long for you, I urge you to look into some of his very excellent shorter books, such as Autumn but also Of Love and Other Demons[3] and Love in the Time of Cholera.[4] (Chronicle of a Death Foretold is even shorter, but I do not recommend it as the first Marquez book you read!) [1] It could be the first 10 or 30 pages, it's been several years, but I am certain it's one of the better (and shorter) examples of his style. [2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060882867 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060882867 [3] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400034922 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400034922 [4] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307389731 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307389731
- ryanpardieck 13y agoI'll always love Autumn. I usually keep a small pile of "guiding light" books around, and Autumn has been in there ever since I first read it ~7 years ago. I use them kind of like reference manuals for the craft, kind of like how we might look through the docs off and on as we code. One of my most cherished book piles.
- noname123 13y agoOT but tangential any magical realism authors to read? So far, I got Marquez, Jorge Louis Borges and Murakami. And preferably recommendation should be good to provide philosophical consolation to a code monkey worker-bee in the capitalist society.
- ulisesrmzroche 13y agoYou may like Rudulfo Anaya, or Isabel Allende. Also, Salman Rushdie.
- ballard 13y agoRushdie can be hit or miss, hits are really good though. Language is decadent.
- gcv 13y agoTry Guy Gavriel Kay. He is generally considered a fantasy writer, but I'd say "alternative-historical magical realism" is a more accurate description. I see a lot of more recent Rushdie in his style. Start with Under Heaven (Tigana is the more common first recommendation, but I don't actually like it as much).
- anatoly 13y agoJulio Cortázar, for his majestic _Hopscotch_, but also and especially for his short stories.
- sfritz 13y agoIvo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina; another Nobel Prize winner
- rimantas 13y agoMaster and Margarita by Bulgakov? Not sure if it is considered a work of magic realism, but elements are there for sure.
- 616c 13y ago
- r4pha 13y agoI absolutely adore this man. I was lucky to be given a portuguese-translated copy of "one hundred years of solitude" at the age of 16. I read it back then and loved the story itself and specially the beautiful writing style. About four or five years later I read it again in the original (even though I don't speak spanish very well) and was even more amazed about the beauty of it and about how _my_ interpretation of it changed. I loved everything I have ever read from him, but I loved "one hundred years" so much I even feel ashamed of trying to use my own words to describe it.
- 3am 13y agoOh no... GGM was an underappreciated author in non-spanish speaking world (in spite of wonderful, gift translators... he was just an intrinsically difficult author to translate because of the poetic quality of his writing IMHO). Cien Anos de Soledad was one of the first non-trivial, non-english books I read. RIP. edit: okay, removed 'really'.. I think he was underappreciated on a popular level, even though he was very well appreciated on a critical level.
- igravious 13y agoDo you think so? He's rated very highly in the Anglosphere I would have thought, he won the Nobel prize for lit. and witness the NY Times obit. here.
- rafaelvega 13y agoCien Anos de Soledad = One hundred asses of solitude (giggle) ñÑ :)
- camus2 13y agoAs a programmer and a poetry/book lover, it is sad news, plrease have a 5min break from whatever code you are writing(on your free time of course) to check this author out!
- tdees40 13y agoMy favorite Marquez story is that he never used adverbs ending in -mente, so he called his English language translator (Edith Grossman) and requested that she not use any adverbs ending in -ly.
- nardi 13y agoHahaha. Definitely different in English. Adverbs I can think of in English that don't end in -ly: Fast, slow, quick, well. That's all I've got off the top of my head.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- noname123 13y agoCan someone tell me what is the theme of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" as applied to modern society? I read the book awhile ago and appreciated greatly the various character sketches. Unfortunately, the literary criticism that I sought out back then at liberal arts college, focused mostly on the metaphor of the European colonialism on Latin America (industrialization of the town with the rubber-plant, and the subsequent massacre of the residents after some kind of rubber-plant revolution, consequences of military rule and violent overthrows as embodied by Colonel Buendia and circular nature of the history, Spanish colonialism past long felt after Latin America became independent). Tbh, I'm not really interested in the whole multiculturalism and ethnic studies rehashing the white guilt trope. However, I find the obsession of the various characters fascinating, the scientific obsession of the original patriach that eventually descended into madness, Colonel Buendia making little gold fishes, the incestuous natures of the whole family, some ethereal nympho character that doesn't speak a word and then one day transcend to haven much to the horror of the venerable matriarch. What is your interpretation of the book?
- timfrietas 13y agoGenerally science and industry are negative factors for Macondo. Throughout the book Macondo grows to be a darker place after a brief initial boost from scientific method; however science when paired with capitalism can be dangerous (unhealthy obsessions with alchemy and banana republics come to mind as examples). Capitalism + science = weapons of mass destruction and war. It isn't necessarily white guilt but capitalist and technological guilt. Of course, as in any Marquez, there's a great deal about how powerful love is, transcending cultural narratives and causing its own problems.
- huherto 13y agoI cannot do a literary critique. But I can tell you that when I was 17, I started reading "One hundred years of solicitude" and couldn't stop until I finished the whole book. I felt enchanted, it is a feeling that I never had either before or after. I read it in Spanish, (my native tongue) so your mileage may vary.
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- deckardt 13y agoThis is one of the reasons I keep reading Hacker News. It's a great source for cutting-edge tech news; more importantly, it's also a great source for important news.
- erikig 13y agoI agree but as I read this I had a morbid thought - I'm posing it wondering if anyone else relates. I couldn't help but think, now that he's dead I can dig into his works without the fear of being overrun by his output. It is as though death has given me a little bit of an upper hand. I think I should go to bed.
- dvidsilva 13y agoI'm so 'proud' to see this here, hard to think of something to say so I'll put one of my fav quotes from him: "She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."
- __david__ 13y agoI've never heard of this man before, nor read any of his books, but that is an excellent quote.
- rafaelvega 13y agoI once met this american guy who told me in fluent spanish that he went and studied the spanish language after reading one of GGM's books because he wanted to read it in it's original language.
- maceo 13y agoLet's not forget that GGM was a life-long socialist and a supporter of the Cuban revolution. He spent many years living and Cuba and he considered Castro to be one of his best friends. He was a firm supporter of Chavez, and looked forward to the day that Simon Bolivar's idea of a united Pan-America would be realized. Because of this, he was prohibited from entering the US during the Reagan administration. As much as I love his works of fiction, my favorite book of his is the first volume of his autobiography, Living to Tell The Tale. I've been patiently waiting for news about volume 2 and 3 ever since the first one came out in 2002. I have never heard anything about these -- whether they were ever written remains a mystery. RIP to a magnificent man who brought so much pride to the people of our scarred continent.
- ballard 13y agoIf I had a hundred up votes button that could only be used once, I would have pressed it now.
- iraikov 13y agoHis writing was like poetry and song, all in one. Second best opening after "A Hundred Years of Solitude": "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide."
- maceo 13y agoIn his autobiography he tells a story I love. While writing 100 Years of Solitude he listened to The Beatles' A Hard Day Night album on repeat. After the book was published he received a letter from a group of Mexican college students who asked him if he was listening to A Hard Day's Night when writing the book, because they felt the album in his words.
- jpdlla 13y agoMy first favorite novel in spanish was of GGM, "Relato de un náufrago"(The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor). Many don't know but the full title is actually "Relato de un náufrago que estuvo diez días a la deriva en una balsa sin comer ni beber, que fue proclamado héroe de la patria, besado por las reinas de la belleza y hecho rico por la publicidad, y luego aborrecido por el gobierno y olvidado para siempre."(The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time.)
- jseip 13y ago100 years of solitude will stand as one of the world's greatest literary works for the next ~1000 years. RIP GGM
- interpares 13y agoHere is a great interview with him in The Paris Review [1]. I love when he says, "It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination." I know the Caribbean very well and could not agree more. [1] http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3196/the-art-of-fiction-no-69-gabriel-garcia-marquez http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3196/the-art-of-fic...
- Myrmornis 13y agoThe spanish department at Princeton was kind enough to let me take a Spanish class while a visiting post-doc. It was great for learning Spanish. But it was so, so painful to see the sorts of pretentious bullshit that the undergraduates were inspired to produce by reading pieces by Marquez, and other South American authors writing in the "magical realist" style. I remember enjoying "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I am sure Marquez himself was great, but in general that sort of crap is exactly what you don't want your children wasting their time studying at university, and potentially misdirecting their professional lives thereafter through an underapprecation of the fact that there is aesthetic beauty in actual real stuff and facts about how the world really works.
- Narretz 13y agoCoincidentially, a few weeks ago I put Marquez on my to-read list. Bein a native German, my first choice was naturally the German translation. English wouldn't be a problem though, so I wonder which one I should choose. Granted, in the end the books shouldn't suffer a lot from translating.
- anuraj 13y agoI read Marquez's master piece '100 Years of Solitude' in my native language Malayalam 25 years ago and it got etched into my mind forever. In the next 2-3 years I read almost all the works of Marquez available in English. Later a lot more Latin American Authors including Borges, Huan Rulfo, Carpentier, Manuel Puig, Fuentes,Cortazar, Paz etc. became popular among the reading public in my region, but GGM was the one who started it all and remains one of my favourite writers of 20th century. Have a feeling that Marquez' did his best in the short story genre - despite his reputation as a novelist. It is a coincidence that one of the first magical realist novels of my mother tongue - 'Khazakinte Ithihasam (Legends of Khazak)' also got published almost at the same time as '100 years of Solitude' was being published in Spanish and both works present highly resplendent and almost spiritual language and journeys (almost untranslatable). Opening line of 'Legends of Khazak'- 'When the bus finally reached Kooman Kavu, the place did not seem unfamiliar to Ravi'.
- nfc 13y agoIt has always struck me how Magic Realism seems to be so prevalent in the literary tradition of such distant and otherwise unrelated areas as South America and India. I am no expert in any of the fields that could try to provide an answer to this so I'm unable to provide a data-backed explanation. All the explanations I can think about are quite "magic realists" so better suited for a short story than for hacker news ;)
- nfc 13y agoRIP. I felt a shock when I discovered this when I woke up. He is probably the author that has influenced me more strongly in my literary tastes. Gabo wasn't just a great writer but loved by many in spanish speaking countries. His mastery of the prose and outstanding ability on his craft are laudable but Gabo was as well a great person. A friend had the chance to meet him in the context of his PhD, I guess I'll forever envy her for that. Being this my first HN comment (thanks Gabo for the strength) I'll go all out with a second unrelated part of the comment, less emotionally charged but perhaps more HN-like: There are many comments in the thread about the translation of the first sentence of "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Translating is such a hard task, there is no way part of the meaning/subtleties will not be lost in it since languages are not one to one. And even if we get to pass most of the meaning keeping the flow will be so hard except for very similar languages (spanish/portuguese). What is an impossible problem for computers is one as well for translators, we can only hope they give as a tasty human take on the task. I wonder if one day automatic translations of literary works will have a "style" options to simulate different translator sensibilities or we will settle for a winner-algorithm takes all the translations. Something more I'd like to share, I'm very curious if other people feel the same because part of my homemade theory of the language depends on this :). I'm lucky enough to read high level literature in different languages, however even if I can appreciate it, the pleasure I experience while reading Spanish is in a different level. Somehow a similar experience happens while talking, I feel more strongly bound to spanish in a very subtle way, it's not something I usually notice, just on some occasions. I only started learning languages after 8. A possible reason is how the brain gets bound to words and language when very young, another is that I have lived more emotional experiences in that language. The second hypothesis would have to explain why I do not feel that way in french even if I've lived in Paris 10 years. Obviously one case study, apply a grain of salt ;)
- jmadsen 13y agoMuch of what I read of his was in Spanish, a second language for me, but even so I could see his command of language was incredible. Things like, in "Relato de un náufrago", the story teller has emotional ups and downs each chapter - and García Márquez carefully chose words that sounded emotionally up or down, giving a sense of rising and falling on waves through the whole story. That, detected by someone whose Spanish was "solid" at best - what a joy it must be for a native to read.
- jortiz81 13y agoMany people in the US, when asked about Colombia, think of negative things; drugs, etc. Also, down in Colombia, the Caribbean coast was often looked down upon by those from the capital -- seen mainly as uneducated people with strange customs and a different way of talking. Gabriel Garcia Marquez uplifted not only the image of Colombia world-wide, but also the image and culture of the Caribbean coast. I am proud that my family is from that region and he made me proud to tell the world that I am Colombian. May he rest in Peace. Also, I think this quote (from an article in NPR) sums up why he's so admired in Latin America: "Garcia Marquez is speaking about all the people who are marginal to history, who have not had a voice. He gives a voice to all those who died. He gives a voice to all those who are not born yet. He gives a voice to Latin America."
- mcguire 13y ago"In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart." "Less plausibly"! "Less plausibly"! Geeze. Someone needs to teach these goobs to write.
- psantacr 13y agoGracias por todo Gabo!
- loladesoto 13y ago“Do not allow me to forget you” ― Gabriel García Márquez (we won't forget you)