Gabriel Garcia Marquez died

[Lynx-lynx]

News from the Aus Broadcasting Corp:

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died in Mexico City, aged 87.

The Colombian's beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers around the world and put magical realism on the literary map.

The epic novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera earned him comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, he wrote of Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality.

Garcia Marquez died at his home in Mexico City. He had returned home from hospital last week after what doctors said was a bout of pneumonia.

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos confirmed the death.

Spoiler:

Known affectionately to friends and fans as "Gabo", Garcia Marquez was Latin America's best-known author and his books have sold in the tens of millions.

Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels such as Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel in the 1950s and early 1960s, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist.

But he then found it in dramatic fashion with One Hundred Years of Solitude, an instant success on publication in 1967 that was dubbed "Latin America's Don Quixote" by late Mexican author Carlos Fuentes.

It tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo, based on the languid town of Aracataca close to Colombia's Caribbean coast where Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927 and raised by his maternal grandparents.

At times comical, others tragic, it sold more than 30 million copies and helped fuel a boom in Latin American fiction.

Garcia Marquez said he found inspiration for the novel by drawing on childhood memories of his grandmother's stories - laced with folklore and superstition but delivered with the straightest of faces.

"She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness," he said in a 1981 interview.

"I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself, and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face."

It was a turbulent period in much of Latin America, when chaos was often the norm and reality verged on the surreal. Magical realism struck a chord.

"In his novels and short stories we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge," the Swedish Academy said when it awarded Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize in 1982.

"The extravagant flight of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions and tangible - at times obtrusively graphic - descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage."

ABC/Reuters

[samhy]

Sad news

[TGS]

Very sad. One of the great contemporary novelists.

[jocampo]

One of the greatest of my beloved Colombia, proud of him. Although, I do not or did not agree with his political views.

Having said that, I'm surprised not many views on this thread/news. He was one of the greatest writers of modern history. "Cien Anos de Soledad" is a classic.

[Billi]

Very sad. I liked his books very much.

[rollei]

Sad news, remembered him for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and his short stories Strange Pilgrims and No One Writes to the Colonel.

[CommonReader]

Yes, sad news - but he lived a fulfilled and creative life to old age, with recognition and fame as an artist. How many people can look back at such a fulfilled life?

Latin America has given us such great authors over the past century; Borges, Pablo Neruda, Márquez, Octavio Paz, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende etc, etc. What a treasure trove.

[Namekuseijin]

I started One hundred years of solitude but sadly zapped away and have not come back to it yet.

well, everyone dies. Not everyone will be remembered for their work like him.

[arjaybe]

Here's another report, with an amazing picture.

http://om.co/2014/04/18/gabriel-garcia-marquez/

[tomsem]

Sad also, that English translations of his works appear to be unavailable as ebooks in the USA.

[jocampo]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Sad also, that English translations of his works appear to be unavailable as ebooks in the USA.

I may be wrong, but I think is because some copyright issues and legal matters with "Oveja Negra", the old Colombian publisher.

I also remember that I read from some Colombian newspapers that Garcia Marquez himself wasn't a big fan of ebooks, so that may also see a reason for that.

It took years for me to find Cien Años de Soledad as a legal ebook. I bought it from Amazon like a year ago.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by jocampo

Having said that, I'm surprised not many views on this thread/news. He was one of the greatest writers of modern history. "Cien Anos de Soledad" is a classic.

I've always meant to see La langosta azul, the short film that Marquez directed and wrote in the '50s. It's on Vimeo, so I'll watch in his honor when I get home this afternoon.

Somehow, I missed your being from Columbia; one of my good friends is from there. She also wired and snaked my first racks of synths back in the days when keyboardists like me needed monoliths to play sessions. She had to deal with a lot of sexism back when female engineers were rare (even though she's one of the best engineers I've ever met).

I read Marquez decades ago and understand his importance (esp. in terms of innovation), but I didn't respond to this thread immediately because I'm not as connected to him as I am to certain other writers (Borges, Cortazar) -- possibly because I read One Hundred Years of Solitude in English translation and don't have your knowledge of the beauty of his language.

I haven't kept reading him for the same reason that I prefer Ovid to Homer: not because the writers I prefer are better, but because he paints murals and I'm attuned to decadent miniaturists.