Nobel Prize Winner Garcia Marquez no more

Nobel Prize winning Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away yesterday at his home in Mexico City. He was back from hospital last week after a bout of pneumonia. Marquez was 87. The celebrated author, who started off as a newspaper reporter, went on to become one of the prolific writers whose bilingual stories of love and longing brought Latin America to the attention of the World. The man was known for inducing magical realism into his works.

Known as ‘Gobo’ by his friends and fans, Garcia Marquez was one of the most beloved authors from that part of the World with his books sold in millions all over.

Marquez, who started off with short stories like Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel in the early 50’s and 60’s struggled for years before he made a foray as a novelist.

Then came, One Hundred Years of Solitude; a dramatic rendition that was published in 1967 to become an instant success. The book was dubbed as ‘Latin America’s Don Quixote by another popular Novelist, Late Carlos Fuentes.

Marquez combined supernatural events and miracles with the everyday details of life and exiting political realities of Latin America from time immemorial. The novel sold over 30 million copies, and was published in dozens of languages and also helped trigger a boom in the Latin American Fiction.

Marquez often stated in his interviews that he found inspiration for novel writing by drawing on childhood memories of his grandmother’s stories that were laced with folklore and superstition but had an essence of a meaningful message conveyed to the readers at the end.

In an interview in 1981, he said “She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. 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”

The Swedish Academy that awarded Nobel prize to Marquez in 1982 spoke about his literary style that connected – “In his novels and short stories we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real coverage. 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”