Gabriel García Márquez: a life of solitude, journalism and magical realism

Few writers have produced novels that are acknowledged as masterpieces not only in their own countries but all around the world. Hailed by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as “perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes”, One Hundred Years of Solitude went on to be translated into more than two-dozen languages and sold upwards of 50 million copies worldwide.
Its writer, Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez —most known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America— died at home after suffering from pneumonia for more than a week in a Mexico City hospital.
87 years before, the father of the literary genre known as magical realism was born in 1927 in Aracataca and raised by his grandparents, two factors that highly influenced his writing. In his novels you can actually feel how it was to grow up with Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, his grandmother, who was “the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality” for him, and the warm and humid climate from the Caribbean. In fact, Aracataca’s tropical climate, its agricultural economy —mainly producing yucca, sugar cane, cotton and bananas—, and its Caribbean culture are 3 inspirational items you can easily recognized in the mythical city of “Macondo” in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. This way, the Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist established him as the defining member of a movement known as magic realism, where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane environment.
In the late 40s, while he was studying law at the National University of Colombia, he started to work for several newspapers, alternating between journalism and fiction. But one day, after hours driving to Acapulco, he decided to start writing a book influenced by magical realism. When he got home, he began writing compulsively for 18 months, while his wife —Mercedes Barcha— had to pawn her hair dryer and an electric heater, financing his writing career.
Finally, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published in 1967.
This fact marked his life forever. It promptly established him as the defining member of the boom in Latin American writing and as the father of magic realism. Soon after the book became his most commercially successful novel and led to García Márquez’s Nobel Prize as well as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972.
After writing One Hundred Years of Solitude García Márquez returned to Europe with his family, while acting as a facilitator between the Colombian government and the FARC negotiations and writing “Love in the Time of Cholera”, a sort of Proustian meditation on time and an anatomy of love in all its forms. Though he lived in Paris, Mexico City, Havana and Barcelona, he was deeply interested in social, political and economical Latin American ups and downs. In 1968, after witnessing the flight of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, he started writing a new novel: Autumn of the Patriarch. According to García Márquez, this short unflinchingly political novel was a “poem on the solitude of power” as it follows the life of an eternal dictator known as the General. But beyond this particular book lays Gabo´s interest in politics. He became friends with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro —”Fidel is a very cultured man,” he said in an interview. “When we’re together we talk about literature”— and the celebration of García Márquez’s 80th birthday was attended by five Colombian presidents and the king and queen of Spain.
Awarded with the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, Gabriel Garcia Márquez was one of the most significant authors of the 20th century.
What we could say is that after all these years writing a lot of newspaper articles and a dozen novels, such as Love in Time of Cholera and Of Love and Other Demons, in the end, it’s not politics, but time, solitude and love that stand at the heart of his work. How to keep pursuing your dreams not to get spiritually old, how time past shapes time present and how several mysteries break through our own existence.