Gabriel Garcia Marquez , who perish today senesce 87 , did not invent the musical genre of magical realism — but he helped to popularize it and shape up it with novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Autumn of the Patriarch . notional fiction still has n’t turn out to the full to the challenge of Marquez ’s work .
Marquez first rose to fame with the 1967 novel Solitude , which fall out several generations of the Buendia family as they plant the town of Macondo , through birth , death , incest and heartbreak . It prove him as a sea captain of magical naive realism , which he often described as a matter of telling fanciful and outlandish item with a straight face .
by and by works , like Autumn and Chronicle of a Death Foretold , dealt with Romance American dictators and other political themes , and Marquez became an vocal critic of authoritarian regimen .
When I first read Solitude , in picky , I was blown away by how vivid the imagery and the characters were , and how great an amount of clip Marquez manages to cover in a individual book . The “ Hundred Years ” in the title of respect is like a form of boast , letting you cognize that this is not your distinctive novel that covers a week or a class . Marquez ’s power to captivate the foreign and monstrous in real life , and to mate that with a piercing political eye , remains unparalleled .
As his biographer Gerald Martin told NPR in 2009 , “ I read the book six months after it amount out . And you had to be there at the time . You had to be in the sixties . You had to be in the world of the Beatles and Third World gyration , psychedelia , lot of things , to realise now what impact the first page of that book had . It just seemed to be a kind of writing that everybody’d been waiting for . They did n’t know they were waiting for it till it came . ”
Ina 1988 review , Marquez explained that his “ wizard realism ” was , for him , just plain realism — because realness is stranger than mass bring in , and because the reality in stories is not the same as homely reality :
You ’ve suppose that every salutary novel is a poetic transposition of reality . Can you explain this construct ?
Yes , I think a novel is world stand for through a secret code , a sort of conundrum about the Earth . The realism you are dealing with in a novel is different from real lifetime , although it is rooted in it . The same matter is truthful of dreams .
This is surely because their rationalism foreclose them see that reality is n’t limited to the terms of tomatoes and eggs . Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full ofthe most extraordinary things . To make this point I usually cite the case of the American explorer F. W. Up de Graff who made an unbelievable journey through the Amazon jungle at the end of the last century and saw , among other thing , a river with simmering water , and a place where the sound of the human spokesperson brought on torrential rain . In Comodoro Rivadavia , in the extreme southward of Argentina , winds from the South Pole sweep a whole circus away and the next day fisherman caught the physical structure oflions and giraffes in their internet . InRig Mama ’s Funeral I tell the story of an unimaginable , unacceptable journey by the Pope to a Colombian hamlet . I remember key the President who welcomed him as bald . and stocky so as not to make him look like the President in powerat the meter , who was tall and bony . Eleven age after this account was write , the Pope did go to Colombia and the President who receive him was barefaced and stocky just like the one in the level . After I ’d written One Hundred Years of Solitude , a male child turned up in Barranquilla claiming to have a pig ’s tail . You only have to start the newspaper to see that extraordinary things happen to us every mean solar day . I cognize very ordinary people who ’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude cautiously and with a lot of joy , but with no surprisal at all because , when all is said and done , I ’m telling them nothing that has n’t happened in their own life-time .
So everything you put in your Quran is based on real life ?
There ’s not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality .
Marquez had an open nous about what constitutes realism , and he told another interviewer that “ My most important problem was to destroy the demarcation dividing line which separate what looks tangible and what looks fantastic , because in the earth that I was try out to evoke that barrier did n’t survive . ” He alsobelieved in unidentified flying object , but think they were just pass on by Earth on their way to some other destination .
Marquez is conk , but he ’s also unreplaceable .
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