“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”―Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
IT IS ASTOUNDING HOW something one may not consciously think about every day may lay quiet and important–within–all this time, only to resurface when it is gone. Such is the case with the very presence in this world of much-beloved author, Gabriel García Márquez, whose 1985 novel, Love In a Time of Cholera, was a very beautiful and memorable part of life . . . And now, the terribly sad news has arrived of his passing today, at his home in Mexico City, surrounded by his family. He was 87.
Believed to be one of the world’s greatest writers, Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia, and began his career as a journalist. He would go on to write many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Gabriel García Márquez was considered the supreme exponent, if not the creator, of the literary genre known as MAGIC REALISM, the intermingling of fantastical, magical elements with the everyday. His was a world where anything could happen, and lovers rekindle their passion after a half century apart.
Magic realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”–from the New York Times
Known as “Gabo” to millions, he first won international fame with what many consider his greatest masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth century literature. Whether short stories, epic novels, or non-fiction, Gabriel García Márquez was, most of all, a brilliant storyteller whose works were a tribute to the power of imagination and the deepest mysteries of the human heart.
He leaves behind his wife, Mercedes, and two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, and an unfinished novel, We’ll See Each Other in August.
List of works
Novels
* In Evil Hour (1962)
* One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
* The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)
* Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
* The General in His Labyrinth (1989)
Novellas
* Leaf Storm (1955)
* No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
* Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
* Of Love and Other Demons (1994)
* Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004)
Short story collections
* A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings (1955)
* La Siesta del Martes (1962)
* Ojos de Perro Azul (Eyes of a Blue Dog) (1974)
* Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories (1978)
* Collected Stories (1984)
* Strange Pilgrims (1993)
Non-fiction
* The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970)
* The Solitude of Latin America (1982)
* The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza)
* Clandestine in Chile (1986)
* News of a Kidnapping (1996)
* A Country for Children (1998)
* Living to Tell the Tale (2002)
[credits : vanity fair // tba // socialphy // nyt]
