Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (American Spanish: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.a ˈmaɾkes] (listen); March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo ([ˈɡaβo]) or Gabito ([ɡaˈβito]) throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha Pardo;they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
García Márquez started as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style known as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in the fictional village of Macondo (mainly inspired by his birthplace, Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude.
Upon García Márquez's death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."
Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927in Aracataca, Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved, with his wife, to Barranquilla, leaving young Gabriel in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía.In December 1936 his father took him and his brother to Sincé, while in March 1937 his grandfather died; the family then moved first (back) to Barranquilla and then on to Sucre, where his father started a pharmacy.
When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Márquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: Gabriel Eligio was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer. Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telephone messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him.[9] Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.)
Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life, his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly.His grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo",was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War.The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly respected. He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year after García Márquez was born. The Colonel, whom García Márquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality," was also an excellent storyteller. He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store. He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs",reminding him that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later integrate into his novels.
García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural." The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents, all of which were studiously ignored by her husband.According to García Márquez she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality". He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, heavily influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was at school; he was 12 and she was 9. When he was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, Mercedes waited for him to return to Barranquilla. Finally, they married in 1958. The following year, their first son, Rodrigo García, now a television and film director, was born. In 1961, the family traveled by Greyhound bus throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City. García Márquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner. Three years later, the couple's second son, Gonzalo García, was born in Mexico. Gonzalo is currently a graphic designer in Mexico City.
In January 2022, it was reported that García Márquez had a daughter, Indira Cato, from an extramarital affair with Mexican writer Susana Cato in the early 1990s. Indira is a documentary producer in Mexico City.
García Márquez died of pneumonia at the age of 87 on 17 April 2014, in Mexico City. His death was confirmed by Fernanda Familiar on Twitter, and by his former editor Cristóbal Pera.
The Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos mentioned: "One Hundred Years of Solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time". The former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez said: "Master García Márquez, thanks forever, millions of people in the planet fell in love with our nation fascinated with your lines." At the time of his death, García Márquez had a wife and two sons.
García Márquez was cremated at a private family ceremony in Mexico City. On 22 April the presidents of Colombia and Mexico attended a formal ceremony in Mexico City, where García Márquez had lived for more than three decades. A funeral cortege took the urn containing his ashes from his house to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where the memorial ceremony was held. Earlier, residents in his home town of Aracataca in Colombia's Caribbean region held a symbolic funeral.[104] In February 2015, the heirs of Gabriel García Marquez deposited a legacy of the writer in his Memoriam in the Caja de las Letras of the Instituto Cervantes.
Courtesy--wikipedia
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez