{"id":29741,"date":"2014-05-13T18:24:40","date_gmt":"2014-05-13T22:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=29741"},"modified":"2014-05-14T00:23:15","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T04:23:15","slug":"gabriel-garcia-marquez-was-to-colombia-what-william-faulkner-was-to-the-usas-deep-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=29741","title":{"rendered":"Gabriel Garcia Marquez was to Colombia What William Faulkner was to the USA’s Deep South"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nby<\/p>\n

Charles Santiapillai<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"William<\/a>

William Faulkner<\/p><\/div>\n

The well known writer and supreme story teller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away on 17 April 2014 in Mexico City at the age of 87. He was undoubtedly the most important modern author who through his writings and satire introduced us to the complex lives of the South Americans. He was the master of the literary genre known as magical realism in which fantastic things can happen. His 1967 classic novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is unlikely to be surpassed by anyone.<\/p>\n

\"Gabriel<\/a>

Gabriel Garcia Marquez<\/p><\/div>\n

It sold more than 30 million copies in more than 25 languages. In Colombia alone, more than a million copies were printed for distribution in Latin America. It is as good as the 17th century writer Miguel de Cervantes’, “Don Quixote”.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez was born on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, a small town in Colombia\u2019s Caribbean coast, where the purest Spanish is supposed to be spoken. He was the son of Gabriel Elijo Marquez, a telegraph operator and his wife, Louisa Santiago Marquez. He was a humble man and I will always remember what he wrote about himself: “Never, come what may, will I ever forget that in the truth of my soul I am nothing more and nothing less than one of the 11 children of the telegraph operator of Aracataca. Such humility is very rare among writers.<\/p>\n

Garcia Marquez was greatly influenced by his grandmother who would tell him weird but interesting stories that sounded supernatural and fantastic. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the character Colonel Aureliano Buendia was in fact based on his grandfather Nicholas Marquez Mejia \u2013 a retired Colonel. It was while driving to Acapulco with his family on a holiday in the summer of 1965 that Garcia Marquez composed that classic, immortal first line in the book, \u201cMany years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.\u201d He braked suddenly, turned the car around, got back home, shut himself in his house in Mexico City for 18 months and wrote the novel that later won him, at the age of 54, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda called it \u201cperhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes.\u201d The book chronicles the fluctuating fortunes of the Buendia family.<\/p>\n

It was Garcia Marquez himself who discovered ice; the little girl in the book who ate earth was his sister Margot; while the character Colonel Buendia was based on his grandfather. At an early age, Garcia Marquez became heavily influenced by his grandparents Taranquilian Iguaran Cotes and Colonel Nicholas Marquez Mejia who fought in the civil war \u2013 The 1000 Day War. The Colonel died when Garcia Marquez was just 11 years old.<\/p>\n

After the death of his grandfather, the young Garcia Marquez was sent to a Jesuit school in the steamy coastal city of Barranquilla, after which he continued his secondary education in Zipaquira, near Bogota. Life for the young Garcia Marquez as a student in Colombia was full of adventure. People around him enjoyed life singing and dancing despite their poverty. Even the tarts operating in his neighborhood had a heart of gold! He went to Bogota to study law but never completed his studies; instead he turned to journalism. The assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, one of the most popular political leaders and a candidate most likely to become the next president of Colombia was shot and killed on 9 April 1948 in Bogota by a drifter named Roa Sierra. In the subsequent rioting, 3,000 people lost their lives and much of the city was burnt to the ground. Garcia Marquez discusses the issue in his 2002 book, \u201cVivir para contarla\u201d (\u201cTo live to tell it\u201d). In 1950, Garcia Marquez joined the staff of El Heraldo. He wrote his first novel Leafstorm in 1954 while living in a local brothel. Unfortunately, this book was not a commercial success.<\/p>\n

He married his childhood sweetheart Mercedes Barcha Pardo, a pharmacist\u2019s daughter in 1958 after a 14-year courtship. She gave him two sons, but he had a fling with that Spanish actress Tachia Quintanar, proving that he was just human. You can feel the presence of Tachia in most of his writings. “Love in the Time of Cholera” \u2013 a very funny book \u2013 deals with the secret relationship between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza and how it was thwarted by Fermina’s marriage to a doctor trying to eradicate cholera. The affair was resumed after an absence of 60 years! No wonder he dedicated this book to Mercedes in 1985. <\/p>\n

In “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” Garcia Marquez relates a story based on a real event, in which two brothers of a woman who lost her virginity, went on to murder the man Santiago Nasar who deflowered her. It was a collective crime and everyone in the village played a role in the gruesome murder. \u201cOn the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at 5.30 in the morning to wait for the boat that Bishop was coming on.\u201d \u2013 so wrote Garcia Marquez. The book was in fact based on the murder of his close friend, Cayetano Gentile Chimento in Sucre in 1951. On his wedding day, 22 January 1951, Miguel Reyes Palencia received a note to say that his new bride Margarita Chica Salas was not a virgin. Promptly, he returned the bride to her parents. Her brothers Victor Manuel and Jose Joachim Chica Salas murdered her ex-boyfriend and 3rd year Medical student, Cayetano Gentile Cimento in public for having seduced, deflowered and abandoned their sister.<\/p>\n

Garcia Marquez was also deeply affected by the murder in 1928 of the banana plantation workers by the military when they struck work against the American United Fruit Company near Aracataca. His leftist views were forged largely as a result of the atrocity. The essentially Latin American book, \u201cThe Autumn of the Patriarch\u201d published in 1975 was referred to as \u201ca poem on the solitude of power\u201d. It was based on dictators such as General Francisco Franco of Spain, Juan Vincente Gomez of Venezuela, \u2018Papa Doc\u2019 Francois Duvalier of Haiti, Jorge Ubico of Guatamala and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of Dominican Republic. As Garcia Marquez\u2019s biographer Gerald Martin points out, it was this book \u201cthat finally confirmed Garcia Marquez as a professional author, the book that showed he could write another big novel after One Hundred Years of Solitude\u201d. In \u201cNews of a Kidnapping\u201d Garcia Marquez deals with drug traffickers led by Pablo Escobar. In \u201cThe General in His Labyrinth\u201d, he deals with the exploits of the extraordinary General, Simon Bolivar who pushed the Spanish out of South America. <\/p>\n

Garcia Marquez, his wife Mercedes and son Rodrigo moved to Mexico in 1961 on the day Hemingway died. In 1999 Garcia Marquez was diagnosed suffering from lymphatic cancer, and in 2012 he was down with senile dementia. He died on 17 April 2014 and is survived by his wife Mercedes and two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Garcia Marquez befriended Fidel Castro, Graham Greene, Bill Clinton, Francois Mitterand, Filipe Gonsalez to name a few, and disliked General Augusto Pinochet. He was to Colombia what William Faulkner was to the American Deep South. The world is just poor by the loss of such a great writer.<\/p>\n

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by Charles Santiapillai The well known writer and supreme story teller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away on 17 April 2014 in Mexico City at the age of 87. He was undoubtedly the most important modern author who through his writings and satire introduced us to the complex lives of the South Americans. He was the …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Gabriel Garcia Marquez was to Colombia What William Faulkner was to the USA’s Deep South’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29741"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29768,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29741\/revisions\/29768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}