Gabo

Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is one of the most important authors from the 20th century. The 1982 Nobel Laureate for his work, he's the earliest recipient of that prize who is still living and, reportedly, writing; it's been rumored for several years that a new novel(s?) is in the works.

Born in Colombia in 1927, the story of his parents' romance would inspire one of his most popular novels, Love in the Time of Cholera. Perhaps his seminal work, however, came nearly 20 years earlier: One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Told with a tone supposedly reminiscent of his beloved grandmother, One Hundred Years popularized a style of writing dubbed magical realism. Therein, supernatural events are incorporated into everyday experience as matter-of-fact with an almost "deadpan" sense of improbability. Ghosts, omens, superstitions - experiences and encounters that are reported and recorded like commonplace ingredients in an age-old recipe. The book is touted as one of five benchmark works in this style and is widely credited for helping to elevate Latin American literature to a never-before-achieved level of acclaim and appreciation.

Solitude is a pervasive theme to Garcia Marquez's writing, and he described his theories about its significance in Latin American history and experience in his Nobel speech. Having lived through decades of turmoil and oppression from the despots and dictators that have ruled Central and South American countries like El Salvador, Mexico, Chile and Colombia, he laments the many thousands of exiles and refugees that have been forced to flee their homes and attempt to exist elsewhere and maintain ties to countries that have never been able to develop a homegrown identity, exclusive of colonial or Western or industrial influences.

"Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

"And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

"Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness."

He goes on to discuss how countries with the fewest resources are the centers of creation throughout the world, with more births than deaths, while the richest countries are the creators of tools designed to obliterate life and that could, in fact, destroy the planet. Yet, his bleak observations are not without optimism, albeit tinged with skepticism. He asserts, in conclusion, that writers, "the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."