GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ dead - one of the greatest writers of the modern era.

[Peter Lemkin]

Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate writer, dies aged 87

Colombian author became standard-bearer for Latin American letters after success of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Obituary: catalyst of boom in Latin American literature
Gabriel García Márquez a life in pictures
From the archive: 1970 review of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez in Monterrey in 2007. Photograph: Tomas Bravo/Reuters

The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who unleashed the worldwide boom in Spanish language literature and magical realism with his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, died at the age of 87. He had been admitted to hospital in Mexico City on 3 April with pneumonia.
Matching commercial success with critical acclaim, García Márquez became a standard-bearer for Latin American letters, establishing a route for negotiations between guerillas and the Colombian government, building a friendship with Fidel Castro and maintaining a feud with fellow literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa that lasted more than 30 years.
Barack Obama said the world had lost "one of its greatest visionary writers", adding that he cherished an inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, presented to him by the author on a visit to Mexico. "I offer my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo's work will live on for generations to come."
Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said yesterday via Twitter: "A thousand years of solitude and sadness at the death of the greatest Colombian of all time. Solidarity and condolences to his wife and family ... Such giants never die."
García Márquez in Mexico City in March. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/ReutersJournalists gathered outside García Márquez's house in Mexico City in the hope that one of the family members who was reportedly at his side would emerge.
Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto expressed sadness at the death of "one of the greatest writers of our time," in the name of Mexico, the novelist's adopted home. Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda was quoted by the Mexican newspaper Reforma as saying that he was "the most important writer in Spanish of the 20th century", central to the Latin American literary boom that "revolutionised everything: the imagination, the way of telling a story, and the literary universe".
The Colombian singer Shakira wrote: "We will remember your life, dear Gabo, like a unique and unrepeatable gift, and the most original of stories."
Born in a small town near the northern coast ofColombia on 6 March 1927, García Márquez was raised by his grandparents for the first nine years of his life and began working as a journalist while studying law in Bogotá.
A series of articles relating the ordeal of a Colombian sailor sparked controversy and saw him travel to Europe as a foreign correspondent in 1955, the year in which he published his first work of fiction, the short novel Leaf Storm. Short stories and novellas with the realism of Hemingway as their inspiration followed, but after the publication of The Evil Hour in 1962 García Márquez found himself at an impasse.
Speaking to the Paris Review in 1981 he explained how he decided his writings about his childhood were "more political" than the "journalistic literature" he had been engaged with. He wanted to return to his childhood and the imaginary village of Macondo he had created in Leaf Storm, but there was "always something missing". After five years he hit upon the "right tone", a style "based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories".
"She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness," García Márquez said. "When I finally discovered the tone I had to use, I sat down for 18 months and worked every day."
García Márquez with a copy of his book One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1975. Isabel Steva Hernandez (Colita)/CorbisRight from the elliptical opening sentence which finds Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad and remembering the "distant afternoon" many years before when "his father took him to discover ice" One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves together the misfortunes of a family over seven generations. García Márquez tells the story of a doomed city of mirrors founded in the depths of the Colombian jungle with the "brick face" his grandmother used to tell ghost stories, folk tales and supernatural legends.
The novel was an instant bestseller, with the first edition of 8,000 copies selling out within a week of its publication in 1967. Hailed by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as "perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes", One Hundred Years of Solitude went on to win literary prizes in Italy, France, Venezuela and beyond, appearing in more than 30 languages and selling more than 30m copies around the world. García Márquez forged friendships with writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar and Vargas Llosa a friendship that ended in the 1970s after Vargas Llosa floored the Colombian with a punch outside a Mexico City cinema.
The Autumn of the Patriarch, which the author called a "poem on the solitude of power", followed in 1975. García Márquez assembled this story of the tyrannical leader of an unnamed Caribbean nation from a collage of dictators such as Franco, Perón, and Pinilla, and continued to draw inspiration from Latin America's history of conflict with a novella inspired by the murder of a wealthy Colombian, The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, published in 1981.
A year later he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy hailing fiction "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". Speaking at the ceremony in Stockholm, he painted a picture of a continent filled with "immeasurable violence and pain" that "nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty".
"Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination," he said, "for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."
An undated photo of García Márquez. Photograph: APThe lives García Márquez next made "believable" were those of his parents, whose extended courtship was rendered into Love in the Time of Cholera, first published in 1985. The novel tells how a secret relationship between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza is thwarted by Fermina's marriage to a doctor trying to eradicate cholera, only to be rekindled more than 60 years later.
A 1989 account of Simón Bolívar's final months, The General in his Labyrinth, blended fact and fiction, but García Márquez never left journalism behind, arguing that it kept him "in contact with the real world". Clandestine in Chile, published in 1986, was an account of the Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littín, who returned to his homeland in secret to make a documentary about life under General Augusto Pinochet. News of a Kidnapping explored how prominent figures in Colombian society were snatched and imprisoned by Pablo Escobar's Medellín drug cartel.
He continued to write, publishing a memoir of his early life in 2002 and a novella that chronicles an old man's passion for an adolescent girl in 2004, but never regained the heights of his earlier masterpieces. His brother Jaime García Márquez revealed in 2012 that the writer was suffering from dementia after undergoing chemotherapy for lymphatic cancer first diagnosed in 1999.
Asked in 1981 about his ambitions as a writer he suggested that it would be a "catastrophe" to be awarded the Nobel prize, arguing that writers struggle with fame, which "invades your private life" and "tends to isolate you from the real world".
"I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere," he continued, "but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer."

[Peter Lemkin]

Gabriel García Márquez obituary

Colombian Nobel laureate who helped to launch boom in Latin American literature with novel One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez in 1984. Photograph: Ben Martin/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Few writers have produced novels that are acknowledged as masterpieces not only in their own countries but all around the world. Fewer still can be said to have written books that have changed the whole course of literature in their language. But the Colombian writerGabriel García Márquez, who has died at the age of 87 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease achieved just that, especially thanks to his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Since its publication in 1967, more than 25m copies of the book have been sold in Spanish and other languages. For at least a generation the book firmly stamped Latin American literature as the domain of "magical realism".
Born in the small town of Aracataca, close to the Caribbean coast ofColombia, García Márquez (or "Gabo" as he was often affectionately nicknamed) always identified himself with the cultural mix of Spanish, black and indigenous traditions that continue to flourish there. Although later in life he lived in Paris, Mexico and elsewhere, his books returned constantly to this torrid coastal region, where the power of nature and myth still predominate over the restraints of cold reason.
This sense of identification with the Caribbean coast was strengthened by the fact that the young García Márquez was forced to leave it when he was eight, so marking out the period of his early childhood as the source of not only his most heartfelt memories, but as the wellspring for his literature. García Márquez has often recalled how, with his father absent as a telegraph operator, he was brought up by a grandfather who told him tales of his heroic deeds in Colombia's civil wars of the 19th century, and a grandmother whose every move was ruled by superstition. This combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary was the world that later resurfaced to such telling effect in One Hundred Years of Solitude and many other novels.
García Márquez's subsequent education took place in the capital, Bogotá, in the other, Andean part of Colombia. He always spoke of these years as of a cold, lonely exile. Forced to study law, he sought consolation in literature. At first, like many Colombians, he imagined himself a poet, until one day he discovered Franz Kafka and suddenly saw that everything was possible for the modern imaginative writer. Spurred on in this way, at the age of 20 he abandoned his law studies and from then on devoted himself to writing.
In the early 1950s he worked during the daytime as a newspaper reporter, first back on the coast and later in Bogotá on the newspaper El Espectador. His account of what had happened during the shipwreck of a Colombian naval vessel brought him renown as a journalist, but also got him into trouble with the authorities. This led to the start of a peripatetic and often wretchedly poor existence that lasted almost a decade. All the while, though, he was using the nights and any spare time to write fiction as well, and his first short novel, Leafstorm, was published in 1955.
Journalism was to remain a passion throughout his life: time and again his fictional stories have their basis in tales he heard as a young journalist, as he explains for example in the introduction to the 1994 novel Of Love and Other Demons. At the same time, whatever fantastic elements are to be found in his novels and short stories, García Márquez learned from journalism the craft of story-telling, showing himself to be an astounding judge of pace, surprise, and structure. He was also immensely interested in the cinema. In Rome in the 1950s he studied at the Experimental Film School, and while living in Mexico in the 1960s wrote several film scripts. He also dabbled in television soap operas, arguing that this was the way to reach the broadest possible audience and satisfy their need for narrative. In the early 1980s he helped found an International Film School near the Cuban capital of Havana. In 1994, he used some of the huge royalties his works had brought him to set up a school of journalism back on the Colombian Caribbean coast, at Cartagena de Indias.
But it is as a writer of fiction, enjoyed by everyone from untutored readers to academics in universities around the world, that García Márquez will be remembered. By the mid-1960s, he had published three novels that enjoyed reasonable critical acclaim in Latin America, but neither huge commercial nor international success. His fourth novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published not in Colombia but in Argentina, was to change all that. It tells the story of succeeding generations of the archetypal Buendía family and the amazing events that befall the isolated town of Macondo, in which fantasy and fact constantly intertwine to produce their own brand of magical logic. The novel has not only proved immediately accessible to readers everywhere, but has influenced writers of many nationalities, from Isabel Allende to Salman Rushdie. Although the novel was not the first example of magical realism produced in Latin America, it helped launch what became known as the boom in Latin American literature, which helped many young and talented writers find a new international audience for their often startlingly original work.
As with many other descriptions of literary schools, magical realism eventually came to seem almost as much a curse as a blessing. García Márquez professed himself amazed at the success One Hundred Years of Solitude enjoyed, and declared that he considered his masterly study of Latin American tyranny in Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) to be a more complete work of art. Almost as powerful were the classical simplicity of Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), the tender exploration of the impossibilities of love in Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), or the study of the collapse of utopian dreams in The General in His Labyrinth (1994).
Those dreams were prominent in García Márquez's speech when he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1982. In it, he made a passionate appeal for European understanding of the tribulations of his own continent, concluding that "tellers of tales who, like me, are capable of believing anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to undertake the creation of a minor utopia: a new and limitless utopia wherein no one can decide for others how they are to die, where love can really be true and happiness possible, where the lineal generations of one hundred years of solitude will have at last and forever a second chance on earth".
García Márquez was also adamant that the writer had a public duty to speak out on political issues. His own views were strongly leftwing, opposed to what he saw as imperialism, particularly with regard to the domination of Latin America by the US. This distrust was reciprocated, and for many years, despite being one of the best-known writers among the reading public, he was denied access to the United States.
His socialist views led him to consistently back the Castro regime in Cuba, and he was a close personal friend of Fidel Castro. His faithfulness to the Cuban revolution led to him falling out with many of his own generation of Latin American writers, who became increasingly critical of the lack of intellectual freedom on the island. In response, García Márquez argued that he used his influence on the Cuban leader to secure the release of a large number of writers and other political prisoners from the island.
García Márquez was also passionately interested in the often tragic political situation of his own country. One of his early books In Evil Hour (1962) looks at the period of political violence in the 1950s, which caused over 100,000 deaths, and both in his fiction and his other writing he constantly looked for an end to the senseless killing.
After his period in exile during the 1950s, the violence of the 1970s also led him to spend most of his time outside the country. He helped founded a leftwing magazine, Alternativa, which promoted broadly socialist ideas, but never became directly involved in the political struggle. In the 1990s, as one of the few personalities his fellow Colombians actually trusted, he was several times mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, but always refused to lend himself to any campaign. Perhaps his most remarkable book about the political situation in Colombia was Noticia de un Secuestro (News of a Kidnapping, 1996) in which he describes in meticulous but passionate detail the kidnapping of 10 people by the drugs boss Pablo Escobar, and the complicated and only partly successful negotiations for their release. Few books reveal so chillingly the ability of the drugs mafia to penetrate to the very heart of society and pervert all its values.
His leftwing beliefs also led García Márquez to oppose military rule in the rest of Latin America. In 1975 he even claimed he would not write again until the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet was removed from power (though he could not keep his word, and returned to publishing in 1981, with Chronicle of a Death Foretold). He also took a strongly anti-British line over the struggle for sovereignty in the Falkland islands in 1982.
Always outspoken in his public comments and in his journalism, García Márquez could also be immensely generous and warm in his private life. He was married to Mercedes, his childhood sweetheart, for over 40 years, and had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo. He was famously loyal to his friends, but disdainful of all those whom he thought of as only being attracted to him because of his fame. Indeed, he often spoke of the difficulties and loneliness that international success had brought him, and sought whenever possible to keep his private world apart from it.
In 1999 the writer was diagnosed with lymphoma, or cancer of the immune system. The illness was to cloud his final years, requiring constant treatment. At times he was so ill that the international rumour mill not only proclaimed him to be at death's door several times, but apocryphal tales of his death-bed conversion to Catholicism circulated widely. Despite these rumours, he embarked on an ambitious autobiography.
Originally intended to be in three volumes, only the first, Vivir para Contarla (Living To Tell the Tale, 2002) came out, telling the story of his life up to his marriage with Mercedes. He also published Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2004), but the very mixed reaction to his tale of a 90-year old and his liaison with a teenage prostitute convinced him that his writing days were over.
García Márquez's intense enjoyment of life shines through all his work, sometimes even seeming to be at variance with what is apparently its underlying message. As the title of his greatest novel tells us, its theme is the solitude and abandonment of Macondo, and yet the sheer appetite for life revealed in the characters and the storytelling itself speak instead of a huge wonder and enjoyment of existence. The millions of readers of García Márquez's books throughout the world appreciated above all that he wrote about immediately accessible themes such as love, friendship and death in a way that was new and yet plainly part of the great novel tradition. To many Latin Americans, García Márquez's work had the added importance of showing them that even if an author is born far from the centres of political and cultural power the sheer force of imagination can succeed in creating a world that will be magically recognised everywhere.
He is survived by a wife, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, and two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
Nick Caistor
Katharine Viner writes: Before the world discovered his prodigious imagination, Gabriel García Márquez was a brilliant journalist with a strong commitment to his first profession. He founded his Fundacion para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano in Cartagena on the Colombian coast to promote South American journalists, and it was at the foundation's 1999 conference on weekend journalism that I met Gabo, as he insisted we call him; as editor of Guardian Weekend magazine, I was the guest lecturer from Britain.
He was fabulous company: both aware of his stature and funny, gossipy and generous. He told wonderful stories about his great friend Castro how Fidel refused to have US satellite TV in his home, but would go round to Gabo's Cuban house to watch it mostly for the sport.
Gabo had strong views on what American culture was doing to the world, and especially to love, telling me, "What is killing relationships is dialogue. If you don't communicate then neither of you is forced to lie." But what was most charming about being in Gabo's company was how he engaged with you with a generosity rare among many lesser figures.
The fact of my vegetarianism seemed to throw him monumentally: "It cannot be true!" he said. "You lack the forlorn look of vegetarians!" We had a small row about this. And then another about a few other things (a photograph of us arguing sits proudly on my mother's wall). "You are a dictator!" he said. "I'm horrified," I replied. "No, it is a compliment. Because I am a dictator as well."
He made the week in Cartagena one of the most thrilling of my life; but it didn't end there. A few days after I got home, a little jaded at my desk, he rang me. "You are a journalist. You are the editor of a fine magazine. It is the finest job in the world!" he said. "I am calling to tell you that we love you, and we miss you, and the places where you went dancing in Cartagena are calling out for you every day." He was a man who knew how to make you feel good; and every kindness sounded like poetry.
Gabriel García Márquez, writer, born 6 March 1927; died 17 April 2014

[Magda Hassan]

It's been a very heavy week for deaths of good people. The world is a poorer place without them but they have all left a wonderful legacy in their works. I really have the need for some emergency kittens to lighten things up a bit. Or picture of David in his golfing outfit might do.

[Peter Lemkin]

It's been a very heavy week for deaths of good people. The world is a poorer place without them but they have all left a wonderful legacy in their works. I really have the need for some emergency kittens to lighten things up a bit. Or picture of David in his golfing outfit might do.

You said it right amiga...heavy week, indeed! Lot a great people moved on and left the World an emptier place - certainly in my heavy heart too. Where is that photo of David I posted...? - can't find it...tried.

[Peter Lemkin]

Gabriel García Márquez in His Own Words on Writing "100 Years of Solitude"

One of the greatest novelists and writers of the 20th century has died. Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez passed away Thursday in Mexico at the age of 87. It has been reported that only the Bible has sold more copies in the Spanish language than the works of García Márquez, who was affectionately known at "Gabo" throughout Latin America. His book "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is considered one of the masterful examples of the literary genre known as magic realism, and it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The Swedish Academy described it as a book "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." We air clips of him speaking in his own words about writing his acclaimed book.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the greatest novelists and writers of the 20th century has died. Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, passed away Thursday in Mexico at the age of 87. Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos, has declared three days of mourning.

PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: [translated] As a government, and in homage to the memory of Gabriel García Márquez, I have declared a state of national mourning for three days, and I have ordered all public institutions to fly the national flag at half-mast. And we also hope Colombians will do the same in their homes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today we'll spend the hour discussing Gabriel García Márquez's life and work, which have sold tens of millions of copies, and we'll feature clips of the writer himself. It's been reported that only the Bible has sold more copies in the Spanish language than the works of García Márquez, who was affectionately known at "Gabo" throughout Latin America. Among his best-known books, in addition to One Hundred Years of Solitude, are Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Autumn of the Patriarch, The General in His Labyrinth.
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. In the 1950s, he began working as a journalist in the capital city of Bogotá. He wrote a series of articles about a Colombian sailor that drew the ire of the conservative government, so he left to report from Europe, where he began writing fiction. He eventually returned to Colombia and in 1967 published what would become his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It weaves together the misfortunes of a family over seven generations and is based in a town called Macondo, which many take to represent the town where García Márquez was born and raised by his grandparents until he was nine years old. The book is considered one of the masterful examples of the literary genre known as magical realism, and it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The Swedish Academy described it as a book, quote, "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." This is an excerpt from García Márquez accepting the Nobel award.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway. I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. 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.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Gabriel García Márquez speaking in 1982 when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of his biographers, Gerald Martin, described One Hundred Years of Solitude as, quote, "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure."
García Márquez's writing was shaped by his political outlook, which was informed in part by a 1928 military massacre of banana workers striking against United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was an early ally of Fidel Castro in Cuba and a critic of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile. For decades, he was denied a visa to travel to the U.S. until President Bill Clinton lifted the ban in 1995.
In 1998, when he was in his seventies, García Márquez used the money from his Nobel award to buy a controlling interest in the Colombian news magazine Cambio. He told reporters at the time, quote, "My books couldn't have been written if I weren't a journalist because all the material was taken from reality."
Soon we'll be joined by Chilean novelist Isabel Allende to discuss García Márquez's life. But first, this is part of a speech García Márquez gave after he sold his one millionth copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] When I was 38 years old and with four books published since I was 20, I sat down at the typewriter and began: "Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." I had no idea of the meaning nor the origin of that phrase or where it was leading me. What I know today is that I did not stop writing for a single day for 18 straight months, until I finished the book.

It seems incredible, but one of my most pressing problems was finding paper for the typewriter. I had the bad manners of believing that misspelled words, language mistakes or errors in grammar were actually created. And whenever detected, I would tear up the page and throw it into the trash basket to start again. With the pace I had gained in a year of practice, I figured it would take me about six months working every morning to complete the book.

Esperanza Araiza, the unforgettable Pera, was a typist for poets and filmmakers who completed the final versions of the great works of Mexican writers, including Where the Air is Clear by Carlos Fuentes; Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo; and several original scripts of Luis Buñuel. When I asked her to finish the final version, the novel was a draft of riddled patches, first in black ink and then in red to avoid confusion. But that was not unusual for a woman used to being in a den full of wolves.

A few years later, Pera confessed to me that when she was going home with the final version of the manuscript that I had corrected, she got off the bus, slipped and fell under a torrential rain. The pages went floating in the mire of the streets. With the help of other passengers, she was able to
collect the drenched and near-illegible pages and took them home to dry page by page with a clothes iron.

What could be the topic of an even better book would have been how we survivedMercedes and I with our two childrenduring that time when I did not gain a dime anywhere. I don't even know how Mercedes managed during those months to not miss a single day's food in the house. We resisted the temptation to take out loans with interest, until we got the courage in our hearts and we started our first forays to Mount Mercy [Monte de Piedad] pawn shop. After the fleeting relief of having pawned certain small things, we had to pawn the jewels that Mercedes had received from family members over time. The expert examined them with the rigor of a surgeon. He checked with his magical eye the diamonds of the earrings, emeralds of the necklace, rubies of the rings, and in the end he returned them after a long pause. "All this is pure glass."

In the times of greatest difficulty, Mercedes did her astral accounting and told her patient landlord without the slightest tremor in her voice, "We can pay you all together in six months."

"Excuse me ma'am," replied the owner, "do you realize that this will be a huge sum?"

"I do realize this," Mercedes said impassively, "but then we'll have it all figured out, rest assured."

The good man, who was a senior official of the state and one of the most elegant and patient men that we ever met, did not tremble his voice either and responded, "Very well, ma'am, your word is all I need." And he calculated his mortal accounts and said, "I await you on September 7th."

Finally, at the beginning of August 1966, Mercedes and I went to the post office of Mexico City to send to Buenos Aires the final version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a package of 590 typewritten pages, double-spaced on ordinary paper and addressed to Francisco Porrúa, literary director of the South American publisher. The postal employee put the package on the scale, made his mental calculations and said, "It will cost 82 pesos." Mercedes counted the bills and loose change she had left in her purse and faced reality: "We only have 53."

We opened the package. We divided it into two equal parts and sent one part to Buenos Aires, without even asking how we were going to get the money to send the rest. Only later did we realize that we had not sent the first part, but the last. But before we got the money to send it, Paco Porrúa, our man in the South American publisher, eager to read the first half of the book, sent us the money we needed to send the first part. That was how we came to be born in our lives today.

[Peter Lemkin]

"He Gave Us Back Our History": Isabel Allende on Gabriel García Márquez in Exclusive Interview

In an exclusive interview, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende remembers the life and legacy of late writer Gabriel García Márquez. She reads from his landmark novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and talks about how García Márquez influenced generations of thinkers and writers in Latin America and across the world. "He's the master of masters," Allende says. "In a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world, and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror." Allende describes the first time she read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and how it impacted her. "It was as if someone was telling me my own story," she says. We also air video of García Márquez in his own words and hear Democracy Now! co-host Juan González read from "The General in His Labyrinth."

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today, we remember the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. He died Thursday at the age of 87. He's widely regarded as one of the century's greatest writers. His masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, sold more than 50 million copies in 25 languages.
To talk more about Gabriel García Márquez, we're joined by Isabel Allende, the best-selling Chilean writer and one of Latin America's most renowned novelists. She's the author of some 20 books, including Maya's Notebook, The House of the Spirits, Paula, Daughter of Fortune. Her latest book is called Ripper. Allende now lives in California, but she was born in Peru in 1942 and traveled the world as the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. Her father's first cousin was Salvador Allende, Chile's president between 1970 and 1973. When Augusto Pinochet seized power in a CIA-backed military coup in '73, Isabel Allende fled from her native Chile to Venezuela.
AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Isabel Allende, and it is an honor to have you with us for this hour to discuss the person who has so shaped literature, not only in Latin America
ISABEL ALLENDE: In the world.
AMY GOODMAN: but has had enormous influence all over the world. Talk about Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel.
ISABEL ALLENDE: It's hard to talk about him. It's very emotional. He's the master of masters. The boom of Latin American literature that took the world by assault in the second half of the century, began in 1963 with a novel by an unknown writer called Mario Vargas Llosa. And that's the moment when the world noticed that we had great writers. And there wereit was a choir of many voices. But the most important voice, the voice that really was the pillar of this movement, was García Márquez with One Hundred Years of Solitude. And every novel that he wrote afterward was not only acclaimed by the critics and translated, and he had innumerable awards, but they were popular novels. It was like reading Dickens or Balzac. People in the streets read García Márquez. Every book he wrote had popular acclaim. So, in a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror, in a way.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, amazingly, in his own country, he washe was virtuallyfor a literary figure, it's unusualhe was like a rock star. Everything that García Márquez said or did, the country followed and talked about and
ISABEL ALLENDE: In the world.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes.
ISABEL ALLENDE: But, you know, in Latin America, that is not a rare event. In Latin America, some writers, because they were writers, have been elected president. Writers are consulted as if they were prophets or astrologers. They are supposed to know everything. And in a way, it makes sense, because in such a complicated and weird continent as Latin America is, somehow writers summarize our reality, the collective dreams, the collective hopes, the fears. They give us back our history, which is usually magical and horrible.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you remember when you first read One Hundred Years of Solitude?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Yeah. The novel was published in 1967, and I read it a year later. I had given birth to my son, Nicolás, who was born in 1966, and I had gone back to work. I was working in a women's magazine. And I remember when I read the book, I didn't go to work. I just sat there with the book until I finished it. It was as if someone was telling me my own story. It was my family, my country, mythe people I knew. To me, there was nothing magical about it. It was my grandmother. I also grew up in the house of my grandparents, as he did.
The story that we just heard about his manuscript, of sending it in two batches because he couldn't afford, the same happened with The House of the Spirits many years later. I was living in Venezuela, didn't have money to send the whole manuscript, and it went in two batches. So, there were so many similarities. We have the same agent, Carmen Balcells, who manyoften she will say to me that I had reactions like him. For example, we would receive a contract. We never read the contracts; we just signed them. And suddenly, for no reason in particular, we would read it and say, "No, this one I'm not going to sign." So, you know that kind of
AMY GOODMAN: She was in Spain?
ISABEL ALLENDE: She was in Spain. That kind of struggle where you feel totally identified with his words, with his work, with his personality. He was a difficult man, but he was so creative, so quick in response. He was an amazing man.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what was it about One Hundred Years of Solitude that made it such asuch a powerful book, not just in Latin America, but throughout the world? I mean, here is thisbasically the story of several generations of a family in a forgotten part of Colombia, a small little town
ISABEL ALLENDE: An invented
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: isolated from the world.
ISABEL ALLENDE: An invented place.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Invented, right. Butand what was it about that book that made it such an important and seminal work?
ISABEL ALLENDE: I think that what happened with magic realism and why people all over the world connected to it is because the world and life are very mysterious. We don't control anything. We have no explanations for everything. And we try to live in a controlled world, because we feel safe. And in this book, and the books that followed, there was this explosion of the unbelievable, which is around us all the time. And it's an acceptance that we don't control anything, there are no explanations, that there is somethingthere are spirits. There are coincidences, prophetic dreams, things that happen that are magical because we cannot explain them. I suppose that centuries ago any phenomenon like electricity would be considered magical. Maybe in 200 years of solitude we will be able to explain what is now magical to us.
AMY GOODMAN: In this clip from the 1998 documentary, Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, García Márquez talks about the role women played in his life when he was a young boy.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] We were the only two men in a house full of women. My life was a strange one, because the women, who were ruled over by my grandmother, were living in a supernatural world, a fantastic world where everything was possible. The most unbelievable things were part of everyday life. I got used to this way of thinking. But my grandfather was the most down to realistic man I have ever known. He would tell me about the civil war and all the political tricks. He spoke to me as if I was an adult. So I was split between two worldsthe world of my grandfather, whom I spent my days with as he dedicated a lot of his time to me, and the world of the women, in parallel with my grandfather's, but with which I stayed alone at night.

AMY GOODMAN: Gabriel García Márquez elaborated on the influence his grandmother had on him as a child and developing writer. This is a clip of an interview he did with the Spanish broadcaster RTVE.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] My grandmother was like my mother to me. She was a person who was quite superstitious. I always had the impression she had a secret link to certain supernatural powers, because in my infancy it was always a marvel to see how she always had a way of knowing things and foreseeing things and having prophecies that would be fulfilled. She was a nervous type, and she died at a very old age, and quite delirious, of course. But the other thing I remember well is that she spoke a type of Spanish that was extraordinary, full of archaisms, spellbinding images. This has been a launching point for me as a writer. I have now researched all her terminology, all her refrains, her words. Now I know them all consciously, but I grew up with those words and those terms with that construction, as if it was the natural speech of the people, because it was what she used in her speech. With that language, I wrote my books.

AMY GOODMAN: Gabriel García Márquez, speaking to the Spanish broadcaster RTVE. Our guest for the hour is Isabel Allende, in this exclusive, extended interview with her responding to Gabriel García Márquez's death. Magic realism, how was that phrase coined? And the influence it's had on, well, you as a writer and people all over the world?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Well, I understand that itfirst of all, García Márquez did not invent it. He was the greatthe one who was able to put it together in such a fantastic way that it was accepted all over. But it began long before. I would say that magic realism begins with the conquistadors that came to Latin America, and they were writing these letters to the king or to Spain in which they talk about a continent that had fountains of youth, that you could pick up the gold and the diamonds from the floor, that people had unicorns or had one foot so big that at siesta time they would raise it like a parasol to have shade. I mean, this isI'm not making this up. This is in the conquistadors' letters. So, in that magical beginning of Latin America and Spain together, this reality was created. And a great Cuban writer was the one who first put the term together, and then García Márquez popularized it. But it wasit is said that it began in Germany, that the first person who ever put together magic and realism was in Germany.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you read the words of Gabriel García Márquez, those words that you read when you were staying home from work because you couldn't put the book down?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Do you want me to read them in Spanish or in English?
AMY GOODMAN: In both. In both.
ISABEL ALLENDE: In both? Let me start with Spanish, because in Spanish this sounds so much better. This is the beginning of Cien años de soledad.
"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de veinte casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarías con
el dedo."
Now, in English.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."
AMY GOODMAN: That's Isabel Allende reading from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Isabel, one of theobviously, one of the big influences on his life was not only his own family upbringing, but the political climate in which he grew up, from the time of the infamous La Violencia in Colombia, where over 300,000 people were killed in a civil war, to, later on, the drug wars in Colombia, the enormous dislocation of Colombian society. Talk about his political views and development and how he showed them through his literature.
ISABEL ALLENDE: He was always a leftist. And he became friends with Fidel Castro very early on during the Cuban revolution. He was adored in Cuba, and he lived there and visited Cuba many times. He formed the film institute in Havana. And his views, his leftist views, brought him a lot of trouble in Colombia. He couldn't live in Colombia for a while because his life was threatened. He lived in Mexico. He lived in many other places. And he died in Mexico, actually. So, he's not the only one, because many of our writers of that time lived in exile and wrote in exile, in Europe and in other places, because it was unsafe to live in their own countries. It happened also in Chile. A wave of Chilean writers left after the military coup, and they wrote in exile.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to this clip from the documentary, again, Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, where he talks about his time in Paris, as we talk about the exileit was the '50s, he had fled Colombiaand how many of his fellow writers from Latin America, who were also in Paris, faced dictators at home.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] What had been important for me, in Paris, was the perspective I acquired on Latin America, because in Latin America I was just a Colombian, a Caribbean, and I deeply am a Caribbean, but in Paris I became a Caribbean aware of his culture and of the more general culture the Caribbean culture fits itself into. In the cafés, I regularly met Argentinians, people from Central America, Mexicans, Caribbeans from different countries.

It was at the time of the dictators. There was Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, Odría in Peru, Trujillo in Santo Domingo. There was Perón in Argentina. There were dictators nearly everywhere. There was Batista in Cuba.

I was living in a pension in Cujas Street, right in the Latin Quarter. The poet Nicolás Guillén was living in a pension opposite mine. Our visits to him were like a pilgrimage. Each of us expected news from his country. One early morning, as he woke up as early as he used to in Cuba, he leaned out of his window and shouted, "He has fallen!" Everyone believed it was the dictator of his own country.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, a 1998 documentary, speaking about his time in Paris in exile in the '50s. Isabel Allende, you were just describing this and also talking about what influenced him: your own country, your cousin, the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, taken down by Pinochet, died in the palace on another September 11, September 11, 1973.
ISABEL ALLENDE: Yeah, and García Márquez wrote about that. He was very active against the dictatorship. At the time, Chile was like the most visible military coup and dictatorship in the world. The world paid a lot of attention to Chile. But there were dictators all over Latin America. There werevery soon, the dirty war started in Argentina. And then in Uruguay, the situation in Uruguay was awful. Brazil, in many places, there was nowhere to go. There were masses of people running away from their own countries and trying to find refuge in another place, and then there would be a dictatorship in the other place. That happened to many Chileans that went to Argentina and died in Argentina. So García Márquez, who was aware of all this and had already lived it in his youth in his own country, and he was in Paris because he was running away from repressive governments, wrote about that. And in his book The Autumn of the Patriarch, hein a great metaphor of all of Latin America, he summarizes the horror of autocratic governments and ignorance and abuse, exploitation, killings. I think that that book represents all those dictatorships.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking with Isabel Allende, the great Chilean writer, one of Latin America's most renowned novelists, speaking about the death of a giant of the 20th century. Gabriel García Márquez died in his home in Mexico, outside of his country, Colombia, at the age of 87 on Thursday. We'll continue with this discussion in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we remember the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. He died Thursday at the age of 87 at his home in Mexico. He is widely regarded as one of the century's greatest writers. Our guest here in the studio is Isabel Allende, the best-selling Chilean writer, one of Latin America's most renowned novelists, as she joins us for this exclusive interview in our studios here in New York. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I wanted to remark, as Isabel has said that thethat García Márquez is still with us in his writings. And all of us who have read his books over the years have our own favorite passages and haunting passages that stay with us for years. I wanted to read one from The General in His Labyrinth.
ISABEL ALLENDE: That's about Simón Bolívar.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right, the story of the great liberator Simón Bolívar in his last days. And the amazing thing, is here you have Bolívar, a figure who's known throughout Latin America, revered throughout Latin America, spent his life in wars of liberation, and in his final days, Márquez has a passage where he talks about Bolívar's disposition to literature and where he had his secretaries reading books to him. And here, Bolívar is dying, and Márquez writes:
"It was the last book he read in its entirety. He had been a reader of imperturbable voracity during the respites after battles and the rests after love, but a reader without order or method. He read at any hour, in whatever light was available, sometimes strolling under the trees, sometimes on horseback under the equatorial sun, sometimes in dim coaches rattling over cobbled pavements, sometimes swaying in the hammock as he dictated a letter. A bookseller in Lima had been surprised at the abundance and variety of works he selected from a general catalogue that listed everything from Greek philosophers to a treatise on chiromancy. In his youth he read the Romantics under the influence of his tutor, Simón Rodríguez, and he continued to devour them as if he were reading himself and his own idealistic, intense temperament. They were impassioned readings that marked him for the rest of his life. In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times. The bookcases in the various homes he lived in were always crammed full, and the bedrooms and hallways were turned into narrow passes between steep cliffs of books and mountains of errant documents that proliferated as he passed and pursued him without mercy in their quest for archival peace. He never was able to read all the books he owned. When he moved to another city he left them in the care of his most trustworthy friends, although he never heard anything about them again, and his life of fighting obliged him to leave behind a trail of books and papers stretching over four hundred leagues from Bolivia to Venezuela.
"Even before his eyes began to fail he had his secretaries read to him, and then he read no other way because of the annoyance that eyeglasses caused him. But his interest in what he read was decreasing at the same time, and as always he attributed this to a cause beyond his control.
"'The fact is there are fewer and fewer good books,' he would say."
AMY GOODMAN: And that is from?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This is from The General in His Labyrinth. And, to me, the image of a warrior spending all his life fighting, but always carrying this huge retinue of books and somehow trying to read everything he could, is classic García Márquez.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to [Gabriel García Márquez] in his own words, as Juan read them, as well, from his book. This is him talking about himself as a journalist, and this reminded me of you, Isabel. He started out as a reporter in the early '50s and returned to it periodically throughout his career as a novelist. This is part of a 1971 interview he did with the legendary writer Pablo Neruda.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] I would like to return to journalism, above all, to be a reporter, because I have the impression that advancing in literature, you lose your sense of reality. On the other hand, the work of a reporter has the advantage of every day being in contact with the immediate reality.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, that was García Márquez speaking in 1971. In this clip from the 1998 documentary, Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, he talks about why he became a journalist.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] I'd say I turned to journalism because, for me, what was more interesting than literature was to tell about real things. From this point of view, journalism has to be considered as a literary genre, specially reportage. I've always defended this idea, because even the journalists refuse to acknowledge that reportage is a literary genre. In fact, they underrate it. For me, a reportage is a short story completely rooted in reality. Though a short story is also inspired by reality, so is fiction. No fiction has ever been completely invented. It's always based on experience. I've realized the way I came to journalism was part of this process. It was just another stage, not in my getting a literary culture, but in the developing of my true vocation: telling stories.

AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts, Isabel Allende, on Gabriel García Márquez talking about journalism and fiction? You, too, started as a journalist and
ISABEL ALLENDE: Many Latin American writers have started as journalists, and even as they became novelists, they continued working as journalists. I think the journalist gives you all the ideas. You are in touch with reality. You are in touch with people, listening to people's stories. In my case, I started as a journalist, but I was a lousy journalist, and I never could stick to the truth, or I could never be objective.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Neither can most journalists.
ISABEL ALLENDE: Yeah, I could never be objective, and I'm sure he wasn't, either, García Márquez. He's making that up.
AMY GOODMAN: But you know that clip that we first played, where he is with Pablo Neruda, and for young people who are watching, listening or will read this in the next days, for those who don't know who Pablo Neruda is, his significance, but also that meeting you had with Pablo Neruda a few days before he died, talking about journalism?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Well, Pablo Neruda was our second Nobel Prize for Literature, for poetry. The first one was Gabriela Mistral. And he was known all over the world. His poetry was translated all over the world. He won the Nobel Prize. And when he got sick, he went back to Chile, to Isla Negra, because he wanted to die and be buried in his house in Isla Negra where his tomb is now. There is a rock, and under that rock he and his wife are buried.
Shortly before the military coup of 1973, I visited him in Isla Negra. And it was a good day for him. He washe was up and around with a poncho. We had lunch and a wonderful corvina, a Chilean fish, and white wine. And then I said, "Can I do the interview now, Don Pablo, because it's getting late, and I have to go back to Santiago?" And he said, "What interview?" "Well, I came to interview you." He said, "No way. I would never be interviewed by you. You are the worst journalist in this country. You lie all the time. You can never say the truth. You put yourself in the middle of everything. You can never be objective. And I'm sure that if you do not have a story, you'll make it up. Why don't you switch to literature, where all these defects are virtues?"
AMY GOODMAN: That's Pablo Neruda speaking to you. And in this last minute we have, your final thoughts on Gabriel García Márquez?
ISABEL ALLENDE: As I said before, my heart is mourning, but not my mind. In a way, I feel great sadness because he's gone. But he has been gone for many years now. He has not been writing for many years. But the books are immortal, and they will always be with us, and I will be able to read them over and over forever. So he's always with us.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for taking this time, Isabel
ISABEL ALLENDE: My pleasure.