Today is the birthday of famous Colombian novelist, short-story writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. Garcia Marquez political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories, who was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War. "My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government," – Marquez said in one of his interviews, jacobinmag.com reports.
Marquez is a master of reality, which, in different periods, is expressed differently. As the European Graduate School writes, in his early works Marquez reflected the reality of life in Colombia, later on he started to describe reality as a static vision. Besides reflecting the reality in his works he was also a great narrator of solitude – a theme, which like a thread goes throughout his literary work.
Garcia Marquez first novel is "Leaf Storm", written in 1955. His best known novels are "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967), "The Autumn of the Patriarch" (1975), "Love in the Time of Cholera" (1985). In 1972 Marquez was awarded Neusdadt International Prize for Literature and in 1982 received Nobel Prize in Literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez suffered from lymphatic cancer and died on April 17, 2014.
Marquez novels are really great works of art, the ideas expressed in his works make people think over and over and understand a lot of things in this world. Here is a small paragraph from his "Love in the Time of Cholera" novel: "He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship... only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia."