Latin American Literature

Prof. Daniel Shapiro

Jhoely Garay Castillo

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, situated in a

tropical region of northern Colombia, between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea. He

describes his town as “a village hidden away among marshes and virgin forest on the

Colombian north coast...a place where the sea passes through every imaginable shade

of blue, where cyclones make houses fly away, where villages lie buried under dust and

the air burns your lungs."

As a child, Márquez enjoyed listening to his grandfather's tales of the Colombian civil war

and his grandmother's stories about ghosts, shamans, premonitions, demons, and

deceased family members.

He entered the National University of Bogota and the University of Cartagena, where he

started studying law but he abandoned law school for a career in journalism. He worked

as a newspaper editor in Colombia and later as a European correspond in Rome and

Paris for a newspaper called El Espectador. When the Colombian civil war broke out

in 1948, Marquez decided to stay close to home to report on it.

The Colombian civil war was a brutal confrontation between conservatives and liberals

that lasted for more than a decade. As armed groups of guerillas roamed the country,

towns and villages were burned to the ground and thousands of people--including women

and children--were viciously murdered. Millions more were forced to emigrate to

Venezuela. In 1954 he was sent to Rome on an assignment for his newspaper, and since

then he has mostly lived abroad in Paris, New York, Barcelona and Mexico.
García Márquez wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best

known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the

Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). García Márquez was known

for his capacity to create vast, minutely woven plots and brief, tightly knit narratives in the

fashion of his two North American models, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. He

popularized a literary style known as Magic Realism, which uses magical elements and

events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations, practice that García Márquez derived

from Cuban master Alejo Carpentier, considered to be one of the founders of magic

realism.

The easy flow of his stories has been compared to that of Miguel de Cervantes, as have

his irony and overall humour. García Márquez’s novelistic world is mostly that of

provincial Colombia, where medieval and modern practices and beliefs clash both

comically and tragically.

In addition to his masterly approach to the novel, he was a superb crafter of short

stories and an accomplished journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García

Márquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader while satisfying

the most demanding of sophisticated critics.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

The Prize motivation was:

"for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are

combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life

and conflicts."