García Márquez Dies: Magical Realism Loses Its Master

Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in Mexico City on April 17, 2014, at the age of 87, and with him went the man who had taught the world to read Latin America on its own terms. He wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude in eighteen months of unbroken concentration between 1965 and 1966 while his family survived on credit from their Mexico City butcher and landlord. His wife Mercedes sold their car, their heater, and her hair dryer to keep the household fed. When he emerged with the manuscript, he told her it was either a masterpiece or a disaster. The novel, published in 1967, sold out its initial Argentine print run of 8,000 copies within a week. It told the hundred-year saga of the Buendia family in the fictional town of Macondo, a place where the miraculous and the mundane coexisted without contradiction. Ice was a wonder; ghosts were household irritants; a girl ascended to heaven while hanging laundry. Garcia Marquez called this "magical realism," though he insisted that everything in his fiction had a basis in the daily reality of Colombian life, where the extraordinary was simply ordinary. Born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927, Garcia Marquez was raised by his maternal grandparents, whose storytelling shaped his narrative voice permanently. His grandmother delivered the most fantastical claims in a flat, matter-of-fact tone that he would adopt as his literary signature. He worked as a journalist for years before turning to fiction, and his reporter's discipline with concrete detail gave his most extravagant inventions their peculiar authority. The Nobel Prize in Literature arrived in 1982, and Garcia Marquez accepted it wearing a white liqui-liqui suit rather than the expected tuxedo. His acceptance speech, "The Solitude of Latin America," argued that the continent's reality was so extraordinary that it required new literary forms to capture it. One Hundred Years of Solitude has sold more than 50 million copies in 46 languages, making it the most widely read novel ever written in Spanish. Colombia declared three days of national mourning upon his death.