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“Poems on the solitude of power.”
That’s how One of the greatest novelists and writers of the 20th century, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez or “Gabo” as he was known in Latin America, once referred to his work. Márquez died on April 17, 2014 in México. He is a major figure in world literature influencing many and inventing a new style of communication with the magic of letters.
Via his many books and the stories within them, he brought the reader visions into worlds where the imagination can engage with reality. Most of these stories reflect a continent’s life and its conflicts. He did this with a lyrical language, one where the surreal and distorted realities are fused to address issues important to Latin Americans; one where we can recognize ourselves as well as our history. Márquez is best known for his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He also wrote Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Autumn of the Patriarch, The General in His Labyrinth, among others
He was born in Colombia in 1927. In the 1950s, he began working as a journalist in the capital city of Bogotá. The conservative government did not approve of his articles, so he left to report from Europe where he began writing fiction. He eventually returned to Colombia in 1967. Due to his political views and writings, he left Colombia and lived in France, Spain, and México. Márquez’s work was always shaped by his political outlook, which was informed in part by a 1928 military massacre of banana workers striking against United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was an early ally of Fidel Castro in Cuba and a critic of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile. For decades, he was denied a visa to travel to the U.S. until President Clinton lifted the ban in 1995.
In 1998, when he was in his seventies, García Márquez used the money from his Nobel award to buy a controlling interest in the Colombian news magazine Cambio. He told reporters at the time, “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because all the material was taken from reality.”
This was a recurrent theme in his work. But in The Autumn of the Patriarch, one of his less known novels, the book is a challenge for some readers, since it takes his style of writing to the extreme. Each chapter, around 35-40 pages, is just one paragraph. Sentences often go on for pages. Within this stream-of-consciousness narrative, the point-of-view switches, often rapidly, from third-person to first to third, and dialogue is found within the prose without quotation marks. This can be hard for many readers to keep up, but there is something breathless in the way it’s written. There are barely any gaps or pauses for the reader to indulge. This is a very deliberate way of writing on his part—as is the equally particular six-part structure of the novel, in which the life and tyranny of an ‘eternal’ dictator is retold in each chapter. Just as in many war novels, this one is delivered through the prism of absurdity to heighten the sense of madness. One could argue that Márquez devised a perfect format for the paranoia and stifling of freedom inherent in a dictatorship with this tightly-packed, recurring nightmare of a narrative, where the simple act of breathing seems like sedition.
This great human being and often nostalgic Colombian said of himself that he was lucky, “since poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures had to ask but little of imagination, because the crucial problem is a conventional means to render our lives believable.” He said, “This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”
And so passed away a great Latin American writer, whose words are inmortal.
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Leticia Cortez. Born in México and grew up in Chicago. She worked as a teacher at Truman College. She is a writer, educator and activist who currently lives and teaches in Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico.
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