Salem Press

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. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones. . . . The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Notable Latino Writers
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Born: Aracataca, Colombia; March 6, 1928

Also Known As: Gabriel José García Márquez (full name)

Long Fiction: La hojarasca, 1955 (novella; translated as Leaf Storm in Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972); El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961 (novella; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968); La mala hora, 1962, revised 1966 (In Evil Hour, 1979); Cien años de soledad, 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970); El otoño del patriarca, 1975 (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975); Crónica de una muerte anunciada, 1981 (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982); El amor en los tiempos del cólera, 1985 (Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988); El general en su laberinto, 1989 (The General in His Labyrinth, 1990); Collected Novellas, 1990; Del amor y otros demonios, 1994 (Of Love and Other Demons, 1995); Memoria de mis putas tristes, 2004.

Short Fiction: Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, 1962 (Big Mama's Funeral, stories included in No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories, 1968); Isabel viendo llover en Macondo, 1967 (Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo, 1972); No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories, 1968; 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, 1970 (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, 1986); La increíble y triste historia de la Cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada, 1972 (Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories, 1978); Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972; El negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles, 1972; Ojos de perro azul, 1972; Todos los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez, 1975 (Collected Stories, 1984); Doce cuentos peregrinos, 1992 (Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, 1993).

Nonfiction: La novela en América Latina: Diálogo, 1968 (with Mario Vargas Llosa); Cuando era feliz e indocumentado, 1973; Chile, el golpe y los gringos, 1974; Crónicas y reportajes, 1976; Operación Carlota, 1977; Periodismo militante, 1978; De viaje por los países socialistas, 1978; Obra periodística, 1981-1999 (5 volumes; includes Textos costeños, 1981; Entre cachacos, 1982; De Europa y América, 1955-1960, 1983; Por la libre, 1974-1995, 1999; Notas de prensa, 1961-1984, 1999); El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, 1982 (The Fragrance of the Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, 1983; also known as The Smell of Guava, 1984); La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile, 1986 (Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, 1987); Por un país al alcance de los niños, 1996 (For the Sake of a Country Within Reach of the Children, 1998); Noticia de un secuestro, 1996 (News of a Kidnapping, 1997); Vivir para contarla, 2002 (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003).

Gabriel García Márquez (GAH-bryehl gahr-SEE-ah MAHR-kays) is among the major figures in the great surge of creativity, from the late 1940's to the early 1970's, that placed Latin America in the forefront of the global literary scene. García Márquez was born in a Colombian village on the Caribbean coast. He was the first of twelve children. Owing to his parents' indigence, he was reared by his maternal grandparents, who provided him with the stories, legends, and superstitions of Aracataca that were in time to inform a number of his short stories as well as his monumental novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was sent to school at the age of eight, after the death of his grandfather. Completing his early and secondary education at Barranquilla and Zipaquirá, he matriculated in 1947 at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.

What to Read: One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the story of five generations of the Buendía family. It begins with the foundation of Macondo by José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula. Despite their fear that the consummation of their marriage will result in the birth of a child with a pig's tail (there is a family precedent for such an event), José decides to challenge fate.

Macondo begins as a kind of primitive paradise. Its only contact with the outside world is provided by gypsies who bring ice and magnets and other items that amaze the inhabitants. They suffer an insomnia plague that results in the loss of both sleep and memory. Modern civilization finally reaches Macondo, however, and with the arrival of the national political parties come civil wars caused by their conflicts. The Americans bring economic prosperity but exploit the workers. These intrusions of foreigners and modernity are eliminated by a flood that washes them away and returns Macondo to a state similar to its original paradise. In the end, Macondo is not a paradise, however, but a fiction: A member of the Buendía family deciphers a parchment written in Sanskrit which foretold the entire story of the family and Macondo from beginning to the end--that is, the story of One Hundred Years of Solitude. History is the completion of a fiction.

Perhaps the most important achievement of this novel is its expression of a mythic reality. Entrance into the magical world of Macondo is an acceptance of the negation of rationality; in fact, the novel is recognized as one of the earliest to use Magical Realism, a hallmark of much twentieth century Latin American literature. One aspect of this is mythic time that negates linear time. The repetition of numerous cycles, such as the names of the members of the Buendía family, create this sense of an eternal present. There is also a biblical level of reading that develops myth from Creation and Original Sin to the apocalyptic ending. García Márquez's creation of a traditional yet fascinating story, his mastery of narrative technique, and his creation of myth make One Hundred Years of Solitude one of the most important novels of the twentieth century.

Raymond L. Williams

During the 1940's he read the modern writers, especially Franz Kafka and William Faulkner. In his freshman year in Bogotá his law studies were punctuated by his reading of fiction and by the publication of his first story, "The Third Resignation," a chilling Kafkaesque narrative about a comatose male who lives from the age of seven to the age of twenty-five in a coffin.

The volatile political situation in Colombia, marked by the conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties, culminated in 1949 with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Liberal candidate for president, and initiated a decade of civil bloodshed known as la violencia (the violence). The university in Bogotá had closed during the preceding year, and García Márquez continued his studies at Cartagena, where he abandoned law studies in favor of journalism.

In 1950 he moved to Barranquilla and became a columnist for the newspaper El Heraldo. Four years later he returned to Bogotá and became a writer for El Espectador, the newspaper that had published his first story. His determination to become a writer had been fostered by his reading of Faulkner, and his first long fictional work, Leaf Storm (a Faulknerian rendition of the thoughts during a funeral that occupy the minds of the deceased's son, mother, and grandfather), was published in 1955. In the same year he was sent by El Espectador to Geneva, where he was left without resources after the military government shut down the newspaper. He then spent some three years in Paris, living in poverty and continuing his writing. He traveled extensively to Europe, the Soviet Union, and Venezuela, where he edited Momento and, in 1958, married Mercedes Barcha. From 1959, the year of Cuba's revolution, until 1961 he worked as a journalist for Fidel Castro's Prensa Latina. In 1961 he, with his wife and son, journeyed from New York through Faulkner's South to Mexico, where in the following year he saw the publication of eight of his stories in one volume.

After the publication of more stories and novellas, García Márquez went into seclusion. He emerged in 1967, having written One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that resists and revises conventional notions of temporality, morality, and the demarcations between life and death. The immediate international success of this novel established its author as a major figure of twentieth century literature. In One Hundred Years of Solitude the history of the New World and of the human spirit is encapsulated in the generations of the Buendía family, the founders and chief residents of the fictional town of Macondo. In the novel the most ordinary events are related as though they were miracles, while ostensibly extraordinary events are presented as mere matters of fact.

García Márquez's distaste for extremist politics, especially dictatorships, is evident in his writing. The Autumn of the Patriarch is based upon the Venezuelan dictator of the 1950's, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. The novel's fictional counterpart, Zacarías Alvarado, is a grotesque whose atrocious tyranny is recorded in an unrelenting style that retains the humor of One Hundred Years of Solitude but darkens it with grisly and diabolic details. The regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile is depicted as oppressive in Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín. Pro-Marxism is much in evidence in this historically based first-person narrative of filmmaker Littín, who returned in disguise to Chile to compile a cinematic documentary of life under Pinochet twelve years after the violent overthrow of the Marxist president Salvador Allende in 1973.

While his views on world events are well known and have been published under fictional guise and in journalistic form since 1968, it is for his Magical Realism that García Márquez has won international acclaim. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1982, and his Love in the Time of Cholera --with its assumption of the immortality of the lover's vow, in which physical resurrection is implicit--was well received upon its translation into English in 1988.

Critics and reviewers continued their praise of his talent and creative imagination upon the appearance of his short novel Of Love and Other Demons, recounting a twelve-year-old girl's "possession" (the effects of an attack by a rabid dog) and a priest's being possessed by rabid love in his attendance on her. The novel, as R. Z. Sheppard notes, extends the gallery of Maconderos and maintains "the daring and irresistible coupling of history and imagination."

In his prologue to Strange Pilgrims, a collection of twelve short stories written between 1976 and 1982, García Márquez is explicit about his concept of nonlinear narrative: A "story has no beginning, no ending: it either works or it does not." Scholars consistently make profound inquiries into the revolutionary art of García Márquez, with its inventive voice and its inexhaustible thematic constitutions, and readers delight in the strangely realistic humor of this creative artist, whom Thomas Pynchon once called a "straight-faced teller of tall tales."

Roy Arthur Swanson

Learn More
Bell, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. This book explores García Márquez's works from a number of different perspectives, ranging from comparative literary criticism to political and social critiques. Aso included are commentaries on García Márquez's styles, including journalism and Magical Realism.

Bell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Includes biographical information on García Márquez, analyses of his major works, an index, and a bibliography.

_____, ed. Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude": A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A dozen essays on García Márquez's masterpiece, comprising a wide range of critical approaches.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Includes eighteen critical essays on García Márquez, arranged in order of their original publication. Also features an index and a bibliography.

Gárcia Márquez, Gabriel. Living to Tell the Tale. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2003. The first in a projected three-volume autobiography. This volume covers Gárcia Márquez's life from his youth until the mid-1950's.

González, Nelly Sfeir de. Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1986-1992. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An annotated bibliography that includes works by García Márquez, criticism and sources for him, and an index of audio and visual materials related to the author and his works.

McMurray, George R., ed. Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. A collection of book reviews, articles, and essays covering the full range of García Márquez's fictional work. Very useful for an introduction to specific novels and collections of short stories. Also includes an introductory overview by the editor and an index.

Mellen, Joan. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. Literary Masters 5. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. An overview of Gárcia Márquez's life and work designed to support the research of high school and college students. Includes a glossary, annotated bibliography, and study list of questions.

Pelayo, Rubén. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. An account of Gárcia Márquez's life, work, and literary style, helping students place him within the canon of Western literature.

Solanet, Mariana. García Márquez for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers, 2001. Part of the "Beginners" series of brief introductions to major writers and their works. Very basic, but a good starting point.