The Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who released the worldwide rise in Spanish language literature and charming realism together with his novel 100 Years of Solitude, died at the age of eighty seven. He had been admitted to hospital in Mexico City on three April with pneumonia.
Matching business success with important acclaim, García Márquez became a standard-bearer for Latin American letters, establishing a route for negotiations between guerillas and therefore the Colombian government, building a relationship with Fidel Castro and maintaining a feud with fellow literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa that lasted over thirty years.
Barack Obama said the
world had lost "one of its greatest visionary writers". Adding to that he said "I offer my thoughts to his family
and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo's work will live on
for generations to come."
Colombian president
Juan Manuel Santos said yesterday via Twitter: "A thousand years of
solitude and sadness at the death of the greatest Colombian of all time.
Solidarity and condolences to his wife and family ... Such giants never
die."
Born in a village close to the northern coast of Colombia on six March 1927, García Márquez was raised by his grandparents for the primary 9 years of his life and started operating as a journalist along with learning law in Bogotá.
A series of articles relating the ordeal of a Colombian sailor sparked disputation and saw him trip to Europe as a distant correspondent in 1955, the year during which he revealed his 1st work of fiction, the short novel Leaf Storm. Short stories and novellas with the realism of Hemingway as their inspiration followed, however once the publication of The Evil Hour in 1962 García Márquez found himself at an impasse.
Speaking to the Paris Review in 1981 he explained how he determined his writings concerning his childhood were "more political" than the "journalistic literature" he had been engaged with. He wished to come back to his childhood and also the fanciful village of Macondo he had created in Leaf Storm, however there was "always one thing missing". after 5 years he located the "right tone", a style "based on the means my grannie used to tell the stories".
García Márquez with a copy of his book. One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1975.
Isabel Steva Hernandez (Colita)/Corbis
Asked in 1981 about
his ambitions as a writer he suggested that it would be a
"catastrophe" to be awarded the Nobel prize, arguing that writers
struggle with fame, which "invades your private life" and "tends
to isolate you from the real world".
"I
don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere," he
continued, "but I would really have liked for my books to have been
published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of
fame and being a great writer."