How to read Gabriel García Márquez

[Judi Lynn]

How to read Gabriel García Márquez
Kelly Gallucci, Bookish 12:03 p.m. EDT April 24, 2014

Some could call him a magician, a conjurer of worlds that blended our harshest realities with our wildest imaginings. Gabriel García Márquez, the beloved Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize winner, defined magical realism. Upon his passing on April 17 at the age of 87 and in his home in Mexico City, the Internet was flooded with his quotations—vivid descriptions of the depth of life, the realities of death, and the candid humor for which he was known. As the world mourns the loss of one of the great voices in literature, we find solace in the gifts that he left to us: his books.

But if you're new to Márquez's work and stymied as to where to start, we suggest you consult this guide for the perfect first book and how to work your way up to some of his most famous works, including Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Start with: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

"He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart."

Márquez was known for many things, one of the best being his treatment of death and the exploration of the complicated emotions that surround it. In this postmodern novella, he uses his skills to breathe new life into old mystery tropes. While Márquez tells us from page one who the victim and killer are (and the motive), he keeps readers in heightened suspense as he examines the crime from all angles and showcases the effect the sudden death has on this small town. More concise than his more well-known works, Chronicle nonetheless provides any new reader with a clear sense of his style and what they can expect from further reading.

Get used to his politics with: The General in His Labyrinth

"Freedom is often the first casualty of war."

More:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/04/24/bookish-gabriel-garcia-marquez-101/8054143/

[Judi Lynn]

1. The magician in his labyrinth

Tuesday, April 29, 2014 (All day)
Gabriel García Márquez

The magician in his labyrinth

Gabriel García Márquez, Latin America's literary colossus, died on April 17th, aged 87


In July 1965 Gabriel García Márquez-Gabo to all who revered him later-decided to lock himself away in a house on Calle de La Loma in Mexico City. He ordered his wife to sell the car and get credit from the butcher. For 15 months, using only his index fingers, he typed for six hours a day in a room he called "The Cave of the Mafia". He survived on a diet of good Scotch and constant cigarettes. At five in the afternoon he would emerge into the fading light with his eyes wide, as though he had discoursed with the dead.

Inside the four walls of that room lay the immense delta of the Magdalena river, the grey frothy sea of Colombia's Caribbean coast, the suffocating swamps of the Ciénaga, the interminable geometries of the banana plantations, and a long railway line that ran into the farthest territories of his heart. It ended at the village of Aracataca, now renamed by him Macondo, where his maternal grandparents had brought him up amid prospectors, fornicators, gypsies, scoundrels and virginal girls bent over their sewing frames. In that room where he had locked himself away he inhaled the sweet milk-candy and oregano of his grandmother and absorbed again the political venting of his grandfather, who had fought on the Liberal side in the War of a Thousand Days and who, at the book's beginning, took him to discover ice, a great block of infinite internal needles that boiled his hand when he touched it.

Latin American literature

"One Hundred Years of Solitude", the fruit of his self-imprisonment, sold 50m copies in more than 30 languages. Critics observed that its style, magical realism as they called it, was not new: Jorge Luis Borges, a blind Argentine poet, had felt his way through those labyrinths before. But its fame was startling. The world was seduced by a Latin America where the Buendía family feuded internally and externally, with rifles or with silence, for generations; where death gave its female victims instructions to sew their own shrouds; where the blood from a suicide by shotgun flowed all through Macondo, carefully avoiding the carpets; and where Remedios the Beauty was taken up to heaven as she hung out sheets on the washing line.

And it was all true. So Gabo insisted, to those who found his world outmoded and impossible. What seemed fantastical and extraordinary was merely reality in its local guise. Between novels he kept up his first profession, journalism, fearlessly reporting government scandals and narcoterrorism. When he had become hugely famous the government of Colombia sent him to mediate with the FARC guerrillas. That was surely as surreal as anything he wrote in the house on Calle de La Loma.

More:
http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=features/magician-his-labyrinth

[HuckleB]

2. Kick.