Download
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, died on Thursday. He was 87.
A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez's masterpiece was One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Garcia Marquez died at his home in Mexico City, where he had returned from a hospital last week after a bout of pneumonia.
Known affectionately to friends and fans as "Gabo", Garcia Marquez was Latin America's bestknown and most beloved author. His books have sold in the tens of millions.
Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels such as Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel early in his career, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist.
He then found it in dramatic fashion with One Hundred Years of Solitude, an instant success on publication in 1967. Mexican author Carlos Fuentes dubbed it "Latin America's Don Quixote" and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda also compared it to Miguel de Cervantes' 17th century tour de force.
Garcia Marquez's novel tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo, based on the languid town of Aracataca close to Colombia's Caribbean coast where Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927, and raised by his maternal grandparents.
In it, Garcia Marquez combines miraculous and supernatural events with the details of everyday life and the political realities of Latin America. The characters are visited by ghosts, a plague of insomnia envelops Macondo, swarms of yellow butterflies mark the arrival of a woman's lover, a child is born with a pig's tail and a priest levitates above the ground.
At times comical and bawdy, at others tragic, it sold over 30 million copies, was published in dozens of languages and helped fuel a boom in Latin American fiction.
A stocky man with a quick smile, thick mustache and curly hair, Garcia Marquez said he found inspiration for the novel by drawing on childhood memories of his grandmother's stories - laced with folklore and superstition but delivered with the straightest of faces.
"She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness," he said in a 1981 interview. "I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself, and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face."
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude was his most popular creation, other classics from Garcia Marquez included Autumn of the Patriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Garcia Marquez was one of the prime exponents of magical realism, a genre he described as embodying "myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena".
His most prolific years coincided with a turbulent period in much of Latin America, where right-wing dictators and Marxist revolutionaries fought for power.
Chaos was often the norm, political violence ripped some countries to shreds and life verged on the surreal. Magical realism struck a chord.
"In his novels and short stories we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge. The extravagant flight of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions and tangible - at times obtrusively graphic - descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage," the Swedish Academy said when it awarded Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize in 1982.
Like many of his Latin American literary contemporaries, Garcia Marquez became increasingly involved in politics.
He spent time in post-revolution Cuba and developed a close friendship with Fidel Castro, to whom he sent drafts of his books.
The United States banned Garcia Marquez from visiting for years after he set up the New York branch of Cuba's official news agency and was accused of funding guerrillas at home.
He once condemned the US war on drugs as "nothing more than an instrument of intervention in Latin America" but he became friends with former US president Bill Clinton.
About the broadcaster:
Anne Ruisi is an editor at China Daily online with more than 30 years of experience as a newspaper editor and reporter. She has worked at newspapers in the U.S., including The Birmingham News in Alabama and City Newspaper of Rochester, N.Y.
雅思阅读实用技巧如何加快阅读速度
雅思的考官解读口语考试各个环节的制胜因素
如何有效实现雅思听力突破的四个进阶
揭密雅思听力三种出题套路考察学生语言功底
经验分享雅思口语考试现场卡壳应变技巧
名师分析雅思考试7月题型解析及8月的考试指导
怎样在平时练习中总结陌生的雅思单词
真题解析如何巧妙选择雅思阅读判断词
名师支招小技巧攻克雅思选择题障碍
雅思考官教你突破中国人最难的九个音
雅思阅读关键重点是要具备英语同义词能力
雅思口语机经6月30日考试话题的汇总Part One
雅思口语的机经6月30日考试话题汇总Part Two
雅思口语8分狂人必练练习口语十个建议
雅思口语机经7月7日雅思口语考试话题的汇总
雅思写作指南学术的三个标准
备考辅导雅思写作的几大易错词汇的纠正
考官提醒雅思写作要开门见山
为什么中国学生的雅思口语成绩全球倒数第一
雅思写作上半年总结及下半年备考策略
雅思大作文高分技巧对比应用突出主题
跟着已知信息走四点攻克雅思听力表格填空题
雅思写作名词性从句学生常犯六宗罪
雅思考官带你进行口语考前的热身切勿紧张
告别雅思口语高分秘笈误区打造口语真功夫
雅思口语考试备考之三步BE计划
雅思考官眼中的口语高分考生语法准确无错误
雅思考官揭秘口语5到8分词汇的真实面目
2013年如何备考雅思雅思的听说读写新变化
雅思口语机经7月12日雅思口语考试话题的汇总
不限 |
英语教案 |
英语课件 |
英语试题 |
不限 |
不限 |
上册 |
下册 |
不限 |