Posted on 04/17/2014 1:27:13 PM PDT by Borges
MEXICO CITY — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality, died at home in Mexico City around midday, according to people close to his family. He was 87.
Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works — among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," ''Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch" — outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Never heard of this guy until I taught some ELS classes. He was the subject of one of the chapters...
I asked my students if they heard of the guy, or knew of his I novels. They all did!
Of course, my students never heard of “Go Ask Alice,” or any of the other literary masterpieces I was forced to read in school.
RIP
16 years after "Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague," the best track on "Uncle Meat."
Magic Realism is a tough nut to crack for me. If anything can happen there’s no tension. I never got through ‘Solitude’.
I never got into Marquez, just never appealed. Most of the women I know have read at least a couple of his, usually Solitude and Cholera.
I was just reading “100 Years of Solitude in Spanish,” when I discovered that it is exactly the same story as “El Sitio de Las Abras,” by Costa Rican, Fabian Dobles, just with a slightly different literary style. Right down to the exploitation by banana companies. Dobles published in 1951 and García Márquez in 1956 (IIRC). Both authors were communists, both with the same axes to grind. IT was disillusioning.
i did read Love in the Time of Cholera... i was on a short visit somewhere, and this book was on a table, so i picked it up and read it... funny thing is, the book had been available at my parents’ home for years and i had never felt compelled to pick it up...
His work has the lyric beauty of the best of Ray Bradbury
The best way to describe his writings is that it helps to know the central and South-American schools of literature.
It has a slower pace and uses a lot of “color”, descriptions of place and mood, putting emotions into words instead of actions.
A good start would be the poems of Pablo Neruda (also a communist), but who was perhaps the best poet in the 20th Century.
http://www.poemhunter.com/pablo-neruda/poems/
Here is a good one from another poet, César Vallejo, also one of the best of that century, called My Sweet Rita!
http://www.connectingsingles.com/poem18284/my-sweet-rita.htm
Magical realism is made-up junk to me. Not real writing.
I know, what? 50 million don’t agree?
That’s fine, I don’t like pretentious girlfriends anyway. It’s like Picasso - only the ‘experts’ get it.
I’m a Tom Wolfe-guy. That’s what writing is.
Tom Wolfe on writing (with mention of mag. realism), for your pleasure:
http://lukeford.net/Images/photos3/tomwolfe.pdf
You’ll ‘see’ the difference.
His style literally defies translation. It is lyrical, needle sharp, self depreciating, humble, and sly, all at the same time. Sadly, I don't think all that comes across when it's rendered in English. In any case, he makes you see Spanish as a very beautiful language. Relato de un Naúfrago, or "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", is his best, and one of the best treats to read, IMHO.
I don’t get the fascination with this guy. I read one of his books, and I thought the old goat wrote weird porn with just enough melancholy and brooding thrown in to be hailed as being great literature by leftist English professors.
RIP.
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