Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.
Cristóbal
Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr.
García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother
said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.
Mr.
García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982,
wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own
creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into
dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers —
Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by
critics and by a mass audience.
“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an
event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in
awarding him the Nobel
Mr.
García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical
realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels
and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies,
tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to
decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a
half-century apart.
Magical
realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious
dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness
and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: “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.”
Ref:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0
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