Gabriel Garcia Marquez: From Reality to Paper

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: From Reality to Paper

"Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood", an expression that Gabriel Garcia Marquez used during an interview to describe exactly how he gets inspired to do his job: Reality (Stone). Garcia Marquez, a Colombian author of more than fifteen highly acclaimed books, is a Nobel laureate, master of Magical Realism, and one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed contemporary authors in the world today. To fully understand Garcia Marquez's contribution to literature, we first need to understand the personal, literary, and political landscapes that have shaped his work.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia, son of Gabriel Eligio Garcia and Luisa Santiaga Marquez. He spent most of his childhood with his maternal grandparents, Tranquilina Iguaran and Colonel Nicolas Ricardo Marquez Mejia. When he was nine, his grandfather died, and he moved to his parents's home in Sucre. When his parents felt in love, Luisa Santiaga Marquez's Father opposed to this relationship. The Colonel Gabriel Eligio Garcia was not exactly the man he wanted to win his daughter's heart. Eligio Garcia was a conservative and had a reputation of being a womanizer. Without paying attention to this, the colonel won Luisa's heart with serenades, poems, letters, and even telegraphs after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the couple. Luisa's parents tried everything to get rid of the colonel but he kept on coming back to her. Her family finally understood and gives them permission to get married. This love story would later on be in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's life one of his most famous novels, Love in the Time of Cholera (Bell-Villada).

Since Garcia Marquez's parents were more likely strangers to him for the first few years of his life, his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly. His grandfather was a liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War. The Colonel was considered a hero and was highly respected. He was also an excellent story teller. He would occasionally tell his grandson "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs" (Stone), reminding him that there was no greater load than to have killed a man, a lesson that Garcia Marquez would later integrate into his novels. His grandfather would be later on during his career, the subject of his novel No One Writes to the Colonel (Bell-Villada).

Garcia Marquez's political ideas came directly from his grandfather's stories. Instead of telling him fairy tales when he was young, his grandfather would narrate the horrifying stories of the last civil war, all of them against the Conservative government. This influences his political views and his literary techniques. His grandmother played an equally influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she would make the extraordinary sound as something perfectly natural. He really enjoyed her unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or non-real they were, she would always made them sound as nothing less than reality and the truth. This was the style her grandson would adopt some thirty years later in his most popular novel One Hundred years of Solitude (Bell-Villada).

Garcia Marquez attended the Universidad Nacional in Bogota to study law, but he spent most of his time reading literature and writing stories. A significant influenced on him becoming a writer was his reading of Franz Kafka's novels. He was also inspired by the modernists, particularly Virginia Woolf's use of interior monologue and William Faulkner's narrative technique themes and small-towns settings. Later on he would integrate these techniques in his novels Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude (Bell-Villada).

Later on in his life Gabriel Garcia Marquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was still in college. They decided to wait until she finished school and then got marry in 1958. One year later, they had their first son, Rodrigo Garcia, now a television and film director. In 1961, the family settled in Mexico City and three years later his second son, Gonzalo Garcia, was born. He is currently a graphic designer in Mexico City.

Garcia Marquez developed as a writer during one of the most violent periods in the Colombian history. During the 1950's, he was living in Europe and writing newspapers. Leaf Storm was published in 1955, marking the beginning of his literary career. However not many people buy or read the book and he continued to make a living by writing newspapers. He also worked on In Evil Hour and No One Write to the Colonel. These last novels were directly influenced by the violence he had witnessed in Colombia and the stories that his grandfather told him during his childhood. They were also more political than his first book (Bell-Villada).

During the period of time he spent of Europe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez interacted with other writes from Latin America. Some of these figures, including Garcia Marquez, would make-up the so-called Latin American Boom, a literary movement during the 1960s when Latin American fiction received much international recognition. The Boom authors were influenced by modernism, leftist politics, and Latin American writers from the 1940s and 1950s (Swanson).

Politics were of major importance to the Boom writers. This movement happened during the 1960s, between the populist regimes of the 1940s-50s, and the overwhelming wave of military dictatorships in the early to mid 1970s. The 1960s was represented in Latin America by culture and hope innovations, and the Cuban Revolution played a big part in the Boom's formation. After the dictatorships fell in Venezuela and Colombia, the defeat of Cuba's dictator followed. Fidel Castro