And give me Gabriel García Márquez over everyone ever. Does One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) tell the life story of an individual? A couple? A generation? No, no, and no! In One Hundred Years, you have five – five! – generations of a family, all of whom have the same bloody names as each other, all of whose lives intertwine over the years, and all of whom live beautifully and die madly and lead revolutions or turn to ghosts or fly off the face of the world. We were taught that novels sensibly told the stories of individuals, not of the history of families or generations, or of whole nations for goodness’ sake. Flying in the face of that miserable little tradition, the many narratives of One Hundred Years spiral chaotically for 400 pages into solitude and death until Macondo itself, the city of mirrors, becomes

‘a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane’.

That is how to write a novel. But now imagine if you can that The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) is even more madly chaotic, unbelievable, and somehow even more impossible to wrap ones mind around.

The novel opens with these gorgeous lines:

‘Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside’.

The book is about the life of the Patriarch in this vulture-ridden palace: a tyrannical and absolute dictator of an unnamed Caribbean nation. A single life sounds muted, I know, but in García Márquez it is anything but. To begin with, there is next to no formatting in the whole book. There are no paragraphs, and no indentations, and hardly a single full-stop: it is a solid wall of perennial text for 229 pages, with three or four merciful “chapter” breaks in-between. Not only this, but the narration is not even from one coherent voice. Like Saramago’s Blindness the narration cuts unseen between speakers, to the effect that the narratives merge together uncomfortably as they recall the life of the great and wonderful man himself:

‘but because it was his natural way of being when power was still not the shoreless bog of the fullness of his autumn but a feverish torrent that we saw gush out of its spring before our very eyes so that all he had to do was point at trees for them to bear fruit and at animals for them to grow and at men for them to prosper, and he had ordered them to take the rain away from places where it disturbed the harvest and take it to drought-stricken lands, and that was the way it had been, sir, I saw it’.

This mix of madness and worship (‘the way it had been, sir, I saw it’) is entirely jarring: it is obviously an insane belief that the Patriarch can ‘point at trees for them to bear fruit’, but the narrative catches you out when this is followed by the way in which the Patriarch ‘points [...] at men for them to prosper’. Such favouritism you can of course understand, but accepting the Patriarch’s power over men requires you to believe – or at least struggle to disbelieve – that he has a power over reality and the natural world, too.

The narrative begins to read like the unreliable narration of a whole nation: it is the thousand voices of a populace which has no choice but to live in a reality which is defined by the whims of the Patriarch. Notice here the way in which the celebrations are tainted:

‘the date of the present decree promulgated orally and signed with the seal of the ring of this unappealable maximum authority of the supreme power, let it be obeyed and carried out. In the midst of the rockets of celebration’.

And so do we trust that? Do we trust the celebrations, so weighed down as they are by the busy syllables of the line before: ‘unappealable maximum authority’. This I think is the really important – and the really incredible – quality of the novel. The lack of punctuation and the walls of text are exhausting to read, but the very act of reading the book is to make a sustained effort to follow and comprehend the narrative, just as the populace must sustain and believe their mad reality (one does not disagree with a dictator). It is a brilliantly drawn, mimetic experience: just as the reader risks losing the thread of the narrative in sentences which are pages-long, so too is the myth of the Patriarch a precarious entity: a fiction which is sustained by belief (and threats, and fear).

The narrative style represents the desperation of the subjects’ united worship: their beliefs are unbelievable, and yet we – and, vitally, they - must believe that they believe it. The myth of the Patriarch, like the noisy wall of words, is poised to fall into incoherence. And yet, disturbingly, the myth is with great effort maintained by the narration of the Patriarch’s subjects, and by us.

It is the postmodern thing that we cannot know our reality. Empirical though I am, García Márquez makes me believe it: the Patriarch – who is a (wonderfully rendered) pathetic, lonely man, and so familiar to the last few decades in world politics – has the godlike power to pick ‘up the reins of reality again with his firm velvet gloves’. The novel invites us to resist the myth-making of tyrants, and to resist the narratives of others.

1. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy – A very intense and violent read that explores the darkest corners of humanity’s heart and man’s moral decay. The conflict is almost Biblical in proportion with a battle between good and evil for the life of a morally ambiguous man.

2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - The story of a man that travels back and forth through time and thus he experiences his life in a non-linear fashion. Sci-fi at first glance but it is really a book that denounces the horrors of war and the unstoppable nature of human destruction. 
3. Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - This book blindsided me. I though it was about the relationship of a butler with his master who is a Nazi-sympathizer. Turns out that the main story is about the butler’s relationship with the housekeeper and the narrative is told through diary entries. It explores the perniciousness of memory  and the moral and societal implications of the setting (the years between the world wars). 

4. History of Love by Nicole Krauss - A very special book that introduced memorable characters and moments that are equal parts heart wrenching and life affirming. It has the most memorable narrator in the guise of Leo Gursky and it also has one of the most profound endings that I have ever read in a book.

5. Man in the Dark by Paul Auster - My best read of the year, bar none. I really didn’t expect to like this book so much since I just read this out of the blue. It has one of the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read that describes the execution of a man.

6. Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco - Another surprise read of the year. The only book above 300 pages that I’ve read in the span of two days.  A novel about the Philippines, its tragedies, and how it affects all of us from a macro POV to a micro POV.

7. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon - A novel that is equal parts detective, alternative history, and literary. Paints a picture of the Jewish experience through the eyes of a Jewish detective who lost his faith and who is investigating the death of the supposed Messiah of the Jewish people.

8. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - A chimera of a novel being a coming-of-age novel and a family saga that explores myriad of issues including gender identity, social pressures, and pursuit of happiness. It has one of the most compelling protagonists that I have ever read in my life.

9. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood - Short but very memorable. It tugs the heart in all the right ways while being funny and endearing without taking away the tragic beauty of Isherwood’s prose. There’s also the fact that I keep hearing Colin Firth’s voice in my head while reading.

10. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe - A harsh tale about loss of innocence in children and the cruelty that they suffered from the unfair treatment they receive from the adults who are supposed to take care of them and, subsequently, from the force of abandonment that they experienced when the adults left them.

11. Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa - The story of the search for three missing men in a village in the heart of the mountains interposed with a story of love and a story about the revolution of the Peruvian people. I liked it because of how it explored the moral ambiguity of revolutions, the dangers of superstition, and the sometimes one-sided  nature of love.

12. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - I don’t even know how to concisely describe how much I love this book. Six interconnected stories that can stand on their own as novellas but, through the very capable hands of Mitchell, is transformed into one novel about the persistence of the human soul and the tragedies and the love that we impart upon each other.

Honorable Mentions: Chess by Stefan Zweig; Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon; Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; Reportage on Lovers by Nick Joaquin; Wit by Margaret Edson; Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck; In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk Leaf Storm and Other Stories, Autumn of the Patriarch, Clandestine in Chile all by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There you have it, dear reader. Those are the 12 best reads of 2012 and I am looking forward for the books that the coming year has in store for me. Bring it on!

A good time to read Autumn of the Patriarch, what with many of our current ones reaching their own dilatory autumns, particularly in the Middle-East, particularly those who came into their twenties and thirties of power during the mutually terrified fifties and sixties and are now, finally, weak enough and senile enough to throw out with the rest of that generational garbage. (This is probably more of an easy relief to those of us who do not have to worry so immediately about what will take their place: you don’t dare and never will dare kill me because you know that afterward you will have to kill each other.)

More directly, some wonderful lines from a book full of them—prose-poetic and laced with the most uniquely utilized adjectives I have ever had the pleasure to read. Like Cortazar and Kerouac, GGM again shows you the type of novel that can be written as a cloud as opposed to a river—an all-encompassing, suffused state, through which you as reader swim your way, catching the glints of condensation that demarcate plot and characters and the other trivialities of the physical world.

These, for which we again have the demigod Gregory Rabassa to thank—if ever you choose to read a translator’s, instead of an author’s, oeuvre, start with his—describe the lustful sexual throws (particularly sex without love, which is primarily, as life without the ability to love, the solitary lust for power) of our autumnal patriarch:

…he slipped, he fell into the illusory vertigo of a precipice cut by livid stripes of evasion and outpourings of sweat and the sighs of a wild woman and deceitful threats of oblivion…his terror of existing through the flash and the silent thunder of the instantaneous explosion of the deep spark, but at the bottom of the precipice there was the shitted slime again, the hens’ insomniac sleep…

Good times.

The year I was introduced to a whole new atmosphere and a vast library which still amazes me for its order and cleanliness. I was acquainted with most of the literary giants by that time. Though my reading in English was limited to Newspapers and a few (famous) plays of Shakespeare and novels of Charles Dickens, my awareness of Malayalam literature was almost up to date with a very good library at home. This was probably the year I started discussing the things I read. Because, before that I haven’t met anyone of my age who read the kind of books I had on my table. S and H were my library-going friends. We even used to borrow books on the cards of some library-allergic people too. ‘Mathrubhoomi‘ and ‘Samakaalika Malayalam’ were the two weekly magazines we used to wait for. Samakaalika Malayalam had the articles and reviews written by critic and writer (late) M. Krishnan Nair (who owned one of the vastest personal libraries in Kerala) which we used to discuss. One formula I followed was to find and read the books Mr. Nair referred in his coloumn. That turned out to be a serious disaster because I couldn’t keep up the pace with such heavy books.

It was during that time that I read the name of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It must have been in Mr. Nair’s coloumn or some of my friends must have discussed him. Anyhow, I searched through the library and found a book by him, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘. Macondo, the imaginary town soon had an immigrant; Me. I walked among the characters and the narration became a magical gossip for me. The stories of the Buendia family and its characters like Ursula, Jose, Colonel, Arcadio, etc became a new thing for me. At that time, I didn’t know the word ‘Magical Realism’. I had to wait another year to understand that properly when O.V. Vijayan‘s ‘Khasaakkinte Ithihaasam‘ was taught as part of our Second Language Syllabus. One thing I soon picked up from all these novels was that they all employed a new way of narration, characterisation and also an imaginary place in contrast with an existing place. Like Marquez’s Macondo, there was OV’s ‘Khasak’ and Mukundan’s ‘Mayyazhi’ (Mayyazhi’ is a real Place). So, I got stuck with Marquez and went on with his novels. I read translations of ‘Love In the Time of Cholera‘ and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘. Then, my father suggested that I should read the English versions to get a better idea of my own and I should stop depending on translation as English is going to be the subject of my Masters. He bought me a copy of ‘The Autumn Of The Patriarch‘ and ‘The General In His Labyrinth‘.

I came to Hyderabad with copies of ‘No One Writes to the Colonel‘ and ‘Chronicles of a Death Foretold‘. The latter was borrowed by someone who claimed to be a voracious reader. At any point of my last six years of friendship with the person have I seen him reading any book. Often have I found him heralding his greatness to mindless beings in public places. However, the book never came back to me even after repeated requests. I misplaced the former during my shifting between rented houses.

Today, I wishlisted all the books of Gabe Marquez as to be bought one by one in the coming month. Once I start getting them, I will have a retrospect reading marathon.

Related articles

• One Hundred Years of Stories (bookblob.wordpress.com)
• Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel Garcia Marquez [Book Review] (anyiko.wordpress.com)
• Engaging literary sojourn (thehindu.com)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (silverbirchpress.wordpress.com)
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez (ajeeshashraf.wordpress.com)
• Book Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (eatingthepages.wordpress.com)
• From death to life (mmorango.wordpress.com)
• “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (breadcrumbreads.wordpress.com)
• A Game Without Rules (nybooks.com)
• Documentary Honors Garcia Marquez (sutradharsmarket.wordpress.com)

10/10

Experimental literature is all very impressive, but seldom is it quite this good. If any readers doubted the abilities of Gabriel García Márquez to stretch himself further than the limits explored in his opuses, to revisit the brave and elaborate narrative structure of One Hundred Years of Solitude, with the constant and overlapping shifts in time and reality, this book will be more than sufficient as an answer. The Patriarch might be dead, to begin with, but Márquez thrusts himself deeply into the old man’s past and tangles himself so far into his life that when his death is reiterated at the end, it comes with a real pang of nostalgia and even surprise.

The experimental sentence structure must be mentioned, if only to acknowledge its overwhelming success. Some of the sentences in this book stretch on for more than three or four pages, piling on commas (or ignoring them entirely) in a decidedly stream-of-consciousness style that still manages to move the narrative along, and still envelopes the reader in the storyline. Márquez is writing expansively, and probably even showing off a little, but he remains aware of his reader and never bloats his work with self-indulgent piffle.

Otherwise, what can be said? What can be expected? The story is as tragically sweet and delightful as anything else he has written. The focus does go beyond the Patriarch himself, but stays much closer to the one central character than in some of his other books that ostensibly centre around elderly men. Intricate character study, celebration of a villainous and heroic legend, deeply intriguing political commentary and sociological hypothesis, and most importantly, a thrilling and moving story. Its narrative scheme is obviously more pronounced than some of Márquez‘s other books, and has the potential to irritate, but considerably more potential to excite and delight. This book could be recommended to anybody, but certainly to anyone who has already fallen in love with the style of this master author.

Continuing the Latin American Fiction theme, here is a review I wrote of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ dictatorship novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch. Written from 1968 to 1975, Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarchportrays a Latin American country through the lifespan of its dictator, from independence to American imperialism in the late 20th century. Garcia Marquez draws inspiration from a multitude of post-colonialist Latin American dictators to form his General who stone heartedly rules over a Latin American country on the Caribbean coast, possibly his native Colombia. The novel starts with the death of the dictator, which is referred to at the start of each chapter as his life, and that of his country, is chronologically described until we again reach the time of his death. At the height of his power, in his younger years, the dictator is full of energy allowing him to effectively rule his country…

In his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells a story about a trunk full of novels by William Faulkner. I can’t remember why they were packed, or where he was going. And I can’t locate the passage, no matter how hard I try. But I can remember the trunk full of Faulkner. And through the haze of my possibly faulty memory, I recall that Marquez remembered and listed every novel that had been packed there. It’s no secret that Marquez was impressed by William Faulkner. Much of his work resembles Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness narratives filtered through a Latin American setting (although a following literary movement would argue that that the magical realists offered a perspective on Latin America that resembled real life as much as much as colored glass distorts reality).

In Autumn of Patriarch, Faulkner’s influence is on full display. Marquez describes the last days in the life of an unnamed Latin American dictator.  The patriarch lives to be well over a hundred years old, and his memories and the narrative drift in and out of time, lingering over and returning to the people and recurring problems in his life time and time again. Borrowing Faulkner’s technique from the first section of The Sound and the Fury, Marquez’s sentences go for pages without interruption, switching perspectives and offering intricate details all the while. The combination provide a hallucinatory effect, when read Autumn of the Patriarch, you’re never precisely certain where and when the events take place,  or who’s speaking, but eventually, everything seems to cohere into one unifying narrative, and ultimately, a beautiful and lonely story about the life of a repressive ruler.

It is, as yet, unnamed.

*

I’ve been sitting here trying to understand clarity, trying to understand understanding itself, but every thought is spiked with you, every flutter of meaning is given music because it flows through your harp, every neural impulse is clothed with you, the interior walls of my skull are spotted with your mould and lichen, and it’s because thinking of you means thinking of the end of the world, of yearning for the end of the world, of being together with you even though smoke and rain and beating drums and fire chase us to these secluded corners in which we explore each other and imprint each others’ images on our brains, because being with you is being locked in a trailer in a trailer park in the farthest corner of what-is-known, it’s I’m not going to work today because I don’t want to or because I lost my job, it’s I don’t care what’s for dinner, let’s just fuck right now, fuck all day and pretend like there’s no tomorrow, because sometimes there really isn’t a tomorrow, sometimes you don’t have to go back, sometimes you don’t have to leave.  I’ll have to go back, and you’ll have to go back, and this home, our trailer that somehow represents freedom, because somewhere behind those rotting pieces of particle board there are wheels here, it’s a home on wheels, it can go anywhere on two continents, Alaska to Newfoundland and Newfoundland to Panama right down to Tierra Del Feugo, and this home on wheels will sit empty, dreaming of when you and I christened it with our sweat.  How sad, perhaps saddest of all, a house sitting empty, its occupants separated.

No one thinks of the house when they’re at work, they don’t think of why it’s empty, of why you’re separated for the greater part of your day, they don’t think that the reason is sitting right there before you, it’s right there in front of you, it’s sitting in your inbox, it’s ruffled around the papers on your desk, it’s hiding in your hard drive, it’s tentacled around the stern wrinkled face of your boss, the tightening  row of your boss, the silvery smile of his boss, and wrapped around the dark checkered tie of his boss, and slithering between the unbrushed yellowing teeth of the severely overweight accounts payable clerk, who smiles without seeing, and says “that’s fair” far too often, so often that you can’t bear to hear anyone outside of work say that phrase, not your friends, not the guy on TV who you have kind of a crush on, but it’s ruined now, ruined now that he’s said “that’s fair” on the latest episode on TV, in the exact  same way as that dumpy accounts payable clerk, and the one thing I ask of you, when we’re here in our house together, please please please don’t say “that’s fair”, because I want to like you, I really do, I want to like you, and I want to like everything that you say, everything that falls tumbling out of your mouth, I want to eat your words and lick my lips and wish for more.  The reason is why I want to like you. The reason is spiked in the coffee you steal from the break room, in the monogrammed coffee mug that is too specific to be one of many generic coffee mugs, the one you don’t really know whether you’re allowed to use because of the distinct I-brought-this-from-home aura that it exudes, but you use it anyway, you use it because it reminds you of something other than work, of something other than generic white coffee mugs, coffee mugs that are all the same, they’re all white and they’re all the same shape and size, and there are coffee mugs like this in the Calgary office and the Portland office and the Mumbai office, and the offices of other companies in other cities, so you use the coffee mug that is monogrammed, that is off-white and yellowing, is chipped on the handle, but in a place that doesn’t bother your fingers when you pick it up, and is slightly smaller than the other mugs, but this is why you like it, and this is the reason, the coffee mug and all coffee mugs like it, the reason is in the coffee mug, the reason is in the coffee stains on your brilliantly white shirt that you just bought last week, it’s woven through the fabric of your work clothes, even the ones that are all inkstained and sweatstained but you wear anyway because sometimes you don’t have any others to wear to work, who has time to do laundry anyway, you think as you pull your arms through the thin fabric, wishing you could wear sweatpants and an I heart NY t-shirt to work and nobody would care, but you realize that the reason is hiding in the stitching of the I heart NY t-shirt as well, even coating the soft lining of your favourite track pants, the reason is tucked neatly between each shirt in your drawer, each pair of underpants, each pair of socks, and each sock you save that doesn’t have a partner because you think you’ll find the other one someday, the reason is tucked into your pants with your shirt, it’s tied around your neck with your generic patterned tie, its buttoned up your chest with your shirt, and pulled into your shoes with your socked feet, and the reason is there in the store with you when you pick out your work outfit, it’s watching you as you try it on in the changeroom, it’s glinting off the scattered pins on the floor that you try to avoid stepping on in your vulnerable light socked feet, the reason glows brightly around each wincing numeral of what you must pay at the cash register, and it glows faintly around each insignificant numeral in your paycheque, the numbers that you get to keep, and the numbers that you get later in tax returns, and the numbers that you never see, because that’s the reason right there, it’s the numbers that you never see, it’s the hours you never live, it’s the long car-rides you never take, it’s the long grass that doesn’t grow on your lawn because you cut it every week, it’s the words you never write down, the ones you forget because you think you’ll remember them, you don’t write them down because you think to yourself, there’s no need, I’ll remember those words, those words, word for word, because those words were important, those words were life-changing, those words tasted so good on my tongue, those words are so much a part of me that if I died, even the gravestone would shout those words, but no, you forget those words, so  quickly, so evenly, so completely, so that all you have left is a fleeting image, an ephemeral knowledge somewhere in the recesses and curves and cracks of your outer cortex that suggests, only suggests, without thought or feeling, but suggests that at one time, there were phrases and sentences that had defined you, but now they’re gone, and they probably weren’t that great anyway if you forgot them, but it’s those words right there, the ones right there that you forget and the ones that suggest to you from beyond the grave of memory, from beyond memory  and what exists in that realm beyond memory, those words are it, they’re the essence of the reason, the reason you know but don’t remember, or have been trying to forget, the reason that you have never spoken out loud in case that makes it true, but you know it, you know the reason, sit down and shut up and face the facts, you know the reason.

Chronicle of Life Foretold

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca,Columbia in 1928.

Until the age of 8 he grew up with his maternal grandparents, a fact that had great influence on his development.

His  grandfather  was  a  Liberal  veteran  of  the  Thousand  Days  War, who  has  shaped  Marquez’s  political  and  ideological  views.

Later, after finishing high-school he went to study law but soon discovered that his passion was writing and never completed his studies.

At  the same time he started working as a journalist for a local paper, having a column and being a film critic. Afterwards, he was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

For years, Marquez wanted to write a book based on his early childhood years. This desire led to the creation of his masterpiece.

In 1967, his most acclaimed book  ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was published.

It was a captivating story of seven generations of the Buendia family set in the fictional village of Macondo.

This  book belongs to the genre of magical realism and it bewitches the reader with its language, style and plot.

Autumn of the Patriarch

After becoming famous with his first novel, Marquez, inspired by a Venezuelan dictator decided to write the novel ‘Autumn of the Patriarch’.

The writing style of this book is remarkable since it features extremely long sentences, some of which exceed more than three pages in length.

In  1982,  Marquez received  a  Nobel  Prize  for  his  contribution  to  worldwide  literature.

Love in the Time of Cholera

‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ was published in 1985 and it is an unconventional love story based on his parents’ real life.

It is a peculiar book overwhelmed by the notion of ideal love that contradicts reality.

In Evil Hour

In 1999, Marquez  was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and although his illness was suspended due to the appropriate treatment, he decided to retire and write his memoirs.

Marquez’s contribution to literature is undeniable. Not only he wrote novels that left their mark on humanity but he also put Latin America to the map of worldwide literature.

By Elena Ralli

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material as hard as wood.”

The above cynical quote comes from a man whose career and reputation was built based on the magical approach of prosaic reality.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is indisputably one of the greatest writers of all times.

His books, being the reflection of Latin America’s nations have touched thousands of people worldwide.

This man is a master of words and a virtuoso of enchanting atmosphere whose writings have placed him not only among Nobel Prize winners but also among the classic literary figures.

This  year, Marquez  became  80  years  old  and  finally  his  original  biography  was  published.

Gabriel  Garcia Marquez: A Life  by  Gerald  Martin is  an  in  depth  analysis  of  the  life  and  deeds  of  probably  the  most  successful  writer  in  Latin  America.

Gerald  Martin  has  spent  17  years  of  his  life  studying  about  Marquez  and  has  finally  managed  to  put  together  all  the  important  information  for  his  life  and  work.

It  is  high  time  the  reader  indulged  in  the  magical  realism of  his  true  life  and   found  out  about  the  events  that  shaped  the  personality  and  triggered  the  imagination  of  this  prolific  novelist.

Of Solitude and Other Demons

Gabo, as people  in  his  native  country use  to  call  him, became  famous  worldwide  with  his  book  ’One  Hundred  Years  of  Solitude’, which  was  instantly  categorized  in  the  literary  genre  of  magical  realism, that  has  ever  since   risen  in  Latin  America.

His  books  deal  with  certain  universal  themes  that  concern  all  nations. The  most  prominent  one  though  is  solitude  and  its  effect  on  people’s  lives. 

His  characters , despite  the  fact  that  they  are  surrounded  by many  people  or  come  from  very  large  families, deep  down  they  are  alone  trying  to  cope  with  their  personal  tragedies  and  inner  ghosts.

Marquez, when  asked  to  comment  on  his  ’obsession’  with  solitude  he  replied: “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”

It  seems  that  his  origin  had  major  influence  in  his  development  as  a  writer. It  is  significant  that when  he  accepted  the  Nobel  prize  back  in  1982, his  speech  concentrated  on  the  solitude  of  Latin  America.

Despite  the  fact  that  Marquez  has  announced  a  few  years  ago  that  he  would  stop  writing, last  May  it  was  announced  that  he  is  currently  working  on  a  new  love  story  that  will  be  published  any  time  soon.

After all, it  is  difficult  to  abstain  from  the  thing  you  love  the  most.

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