Monday | 7 October 2024 | Reg No- 06
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Monday | 7 October 2024 | Epaper

The incredible adventures of Gabriel García Márquez

Published : Friday, 8 March, 2019 at 12:00 AM  Count : 324
Iftikhar Hossen
Gabriel Marquez was born on March 6, 1927, to Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran and Gabriel Eligio Garcia in Aracataca, Colombia. The prized author and journalist is known to many as simply Gabo. With lyricism and marked wisdom, Marquez has been recognized as one of the most remarkable storytellers of the 20th century.
Luisa's parents did not approve of her marriage to a telegraph operator, and her son Gabriel, the oldest of twelve children, was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. Marquez later would claim that his love of story-telling came from his grandparents. On December 6, in the Cienaga train station, about 3,000 striking banana workers were shot and killed by troops from Antioquia. The incident was officially forgotten, and it is omitted from Colombian history textbooks. Although Marquez was still a baby, this event was to have a profound effect on his writing.
When Marquez was eight years old, his grandfather died. At that time it was also clear that his grandmother, who was going blind, was increasingly helpless. He was sent to live with his parents and siblings, whom he barely knew, in Sucre. A bright pupil, he won scholarships to complete his secondary education at the Colegio Nacional. There he discovered literature and admired a group of poets called the piedra y cielo ("stone and sky"). This group included Eduardo Carranza, Jorge Rojas, and Aurelio Arturo, and their literary grandfathers were Juan Ramon Jimenez and Pablo Neruda.
In 1946, Marquez entered law school at the National University of Bogota. There he began reading Kafka and publishing his first short stories in leading liberal newspapers.
Marquez's literary career was sparked, oddly enough, by the long period of political violence and repression known in Colombia as la violencia. On April 9, 1948, the assassination of the Liberal presidential candidate led to three days of riots. One of the buildings that burned was Marquez's pension, and his manuscripts were destroyed along with his living quarters. The National University was closed, and Marquez was forced to go elsewhere. He went to the university in Cartagena and took up journalism to support himself. In 1950 he abandoned his legal studies and began writing columns and stories for El Heraldo, a Liberal newspaper. He also began associating with a group of young writers in the area, who admired modernists like Joyce, Woolf, and Hemingway and who introduced Marquez to Faulkner. In 1954 he returned to Bogota as a reporter for El Espectador.
Marquez's first novel, Leaf Storm, was published by a small Bogota press in 1955. That year he also began attending meetings of the Colombian Communist Party and traveling to Europe as a foreign correspondent. He also wrote his second novel, In Evil Hour, and began work on a collection of short stories called No One Writes to the Colonel. In 1956, Marquez was in Paris as a correspondent for El Espectador when he learned that the dictator Rojas Pinalla had closed the newspaper. Stuck in France, Marquez cashed in his return plane ticket, went hunting for journalism work, and collected bottles to help pay the cost of his rent. The next year he managed to travel to Eastern Europe and secure an editor position at a newspaper in Caracas. In 1958 he returned to Barranquilla to marry Mercedes Barcha, his childhood sweetheart. (He claimed that she was 13 when he first proposed.) They lived together in Caracas from 1957 to 1959, while Marquez continued to work as a journalist and wrote fiction.
On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro's guerrilla revolution triumphed and the fighters marched into Havana. This revolution was of crucial importance to contemporary Latin American history, and its impact on Marquez cannot be overstated. That year he became the Bogota correspondent for Prensa Latina, the new Cuban news agency. Also of note that year--this becomes of importance in One Hundred Years of Solitude--was the birth of his first child, Rodrigo, on August 24. Marquez spent the next two years in the United States working for Prensa Latina. In 1961 he won the Esso Literary Prize in Colombia for In Evil Hour. When the book was republished in Madrid a year later with unauthorized language changes, he repudiated the edition.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has many trademarks in his novels. For instance, both Chronicle of a Death Foretold and One Hundred Years of Solitude start out in medias res, or in the middle of things, with a declaration that their protagonists are going to die in the novel. Also, Marquez often uses events and characters from his own life in his books. For example, Mercedes Barcha, his wife, is in Chronicle of a Death Foretold under her own name as the narrator's young wife. The narrator even says he proposed to her as soon as she finished primary school, much like the real-life Mercedes Barcha. Luisa Santiaga is the name of both the narrator's mother in the book and Marquez's mother in reality. Marquez's brother is named Luis Enrique; both the narrator and Marquez have a sister who is a nun. Gabriel Garcia Marquez suffered from lymphatic cancer and passed away on April 17 in 2014.

March 6 marked the 92nd birth anniversary of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  
The writer is a freelance contributor.


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