|
| author's
works |
|
Gabriel García Márquez
|
|
|
Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian-born writer
of astonishing skill, thought by many to be one of the world's
greatest living authors. A resident of Mexico City, he is considered
one of the pioneers of the Latin American "boom," and was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. To read his work is to
enter a world that is both enchanting in its beauty and haunting
in its dreamy familiarity. The world of Gabo's fiction is a
magical realm where the strange and exotic can suddenly become
comfortably familiar, and the whole concept of an objective
reality is put in question. Here, the borders between life and
death swirl together in a gentle and mysterious twilight, and
-- if we allow it to possess us -- love can strike flaming miracles
from the ashes of our soul. |
 |
|
One
Hundred Years of Solitude |
The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village
founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied
by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's
name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons,
Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José
Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas,
a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to
remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the
air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and
deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years
of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout,
hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the
effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding
through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's
magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio
Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía has killed
in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's
house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its
wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that
"the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on
the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from
then on she placed water jugs all about the house."
With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García
Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide
readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages,
his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at
the apex of 20th-century literature. --Alix Wilber
William
Kennedy, New York Times Book Review
"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece
of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required
reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after
Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting
on everything that happened in between with more lucidity,
wit, wisdom, and poetry that is expected from 100 years of
novelists, let alone one man...Mr. Garca Mrquez has done nothing
less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,
meaningful, and meaningless in life."
|
 |
|
Love
in the Time of Cholera |
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years
of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited
passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together
for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza,
who waits more than half a century to declare his undying
love... Read
more
|
 |
|
Chronicle
of a Death Foretold |
"EXQUISITELY HARROWING . . . . Very strange and brilliantly
conceived. . . . A sort of metaphysical murder mystery. .
. . The murder will stand among the innumerable murders of
modern literature as one of the best and most powerfully rendered."
A mysterious and haunting tale of romance and murder,... Read
more
|
 |
|
Of
Love and Other Demons |
In a South American seaport town, during the colonial era,
when the division between the rich and the poor, the church
and the state, and the saint and the demon were absolute,
and people strutted and fretted about appropriately, 12-year-old
Mari{Á}a de Todos los Angeles, daughter of the marquis de...
Read
more
|
More
Books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
|
| articles
and reviews |
|
from THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS - September 16, 1997
Report from an Undeclared War
by ALASTAIR REID
News
of a Kidnapping
n late February of this year, just as Colombia was preparing to
celebrate his seventieth birthday on March 6, Gabriel García
Márquez announced from his house in Cartagena that he would
not be present for the occasion. Colombia, he said, "had become
an uncomfortable country, uncertain and troubling for a writer,"
and he was exiling himself to Mexico, where he has lived intermittently
for much of his writing life.
The reaction of most Colombians was more sorrowful than angry, although
a few irritated columns appeared in the press. Even so, the country
went ahead with its celebrations, and the newspapers of March 6
not only took notice of the event on their front pages, but reviewed
the long and fruitful writing career of their Nobel laureate and
carried reminiscences of his early unheralded days by some of his
oldest friends. Caracol, the radio channel to which many Colombians
are addicted, ran a whole morning of remembrances, but on this occasion
there was no word at all from the writer himself. Unlike the majority
of Colombians, he had the choice of living elsewhere... [more]
from THE NEW YORK TIMES - April 10, 1988
THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW
By Thomas Pynchon
LOVE
IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
LOVE, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us,
love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some
point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention,
and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still
talking a game of eternity. It's about then that we may begin to
regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age
pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly
impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.
At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic
infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent,
premortal hope? Pretty far out on life's limb, at least. Suppose,
then, it were possible, not only to swear love ''forever,'' but
actually to follow through on it - to live a long, full and authentic
life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious
time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel ''Love in the Time of Cholera,''
one on which he delivers, and triumphantly... [more]
from THE NEW YORK TIMES - May 28, 1995
By Love Possessed
By A. S. Byatt;
OF
LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
BRIGHT hair twined in old bones in charnel houses is an image
that perennially moves the human mind. It is an image, sinister
and glittering, of the persistence of something after death. Browning
and Donne startled their readers with it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
new novel opens with a description of the author-narrator, in 1949,
reporting the excavation of a convent of Clarissan nuns, and seeing
"a stream of living hair the intense color of copper" spill out
of the crypt. It is the hair of Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles,
a 12-year-old marquise two hundred years dead. "Of Love and Other
Demons" -- translated now by Edith Grossman -- is her story, grotesque,
terrible, glinting and gloomy. The world is the familiar Garcia
Marquez world, a mixture of phantasmagoria and a realism whose truths
seem as incredible and strange as the moments of demonic magic.
The tale -- spare and swift in the telling -- has all the ineluctable,
irrational fatality of "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (1982), though
the love story, also grim and driven, has none of the comic and
inconsequential gentleness of "Love in the Time of Cholera" (1988)...
[more]
from THE NEW YORK TIMES - February 21, 1988
GABRIEL MARQUEZ ON LOVE, PLAGUES AND POLITICS
By MARLISE SIMONS
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about to publish ''Love in the Time of
Cholera,'' a work he calls a novel of manners: the story of two
people whose love, thwarted in their youth, finally flourishes when
they are close to 80.
A Colombian by birth as well as by literary inspiration, he will
soon be 60 and seems as busy, vigorous and playful as ever. After
mediating in the early 1980's between the Colombian Government and
leftist guerrillas, he has not returned to Colombia because of widespread
violence there. These days, he and his wife, Mercedes, divide their
time between Mexico City, their permanent home for the last 25 years,
and Havana, where he is organizing and directing the Foundation
of New Latin American Cinema. Film is an old love of this Nobel
laureate, and the dramatic possibilities of television also fascinate
him... [more]
|
| resources |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
