Life and works of Gabriel García Márquez

Life of Gabriel García Márquez

Emblematic figure of magical realism and the Boom of Latin-American literature of the 1960s, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez received the prize Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 as recognition of an innovative work and singular imaginative fantasy. Garcia Marquez created a new language, an American mode of expression, which is carried out on a capital of experiences and realities which the author transforms, and opened a way of storytelling that it would then have many followers in the Hispanic literary field. Through the following photos we can review some aspects of his life and his work. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

Figure world. 

The culmination of magical realism (and, above all, its strong international dissemination as emblematic representative of the Boom in Latin American literature) is associated with the trajectory of the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, particularly by this singular literary milestone which meant the publication of Cien Años de soledad, the novel which is considered paradigmatic of this current. However, the further career of the writer, with delivery to printing of new masterpieces, eventually overflowing classifications, making it first of all in one of the key writers in the Hispanic world and a figure of the narrative world of our time. In the image, Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes at a Conference in the Chair Julio Cortázar.

Family photo. 

His childhood was spent in his native village, located on the Atlantic coast, with a rich oral culture that nourished the primordial fantasies of the future creator of the cosmogony of Macondo. In living to tell the tale, first part of his memoirs, reveals many details of this period of his personal and family life: the spirit of his grandfather, Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, the personality of her maternal grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán, the dreams of his father, Gabriel Eligio, and vital patience of his mother, Luisa Santiaga, whose most notorious virtues were "the sense of humor and health of iron which the Wiles of adversity would not achieve defeat in its long life". All his work, repeatedly said the author, is inspired by his childhood in Aracataca. In the picture, Garcia Marquez (Center) with his brothers.

Journalist. 

In 1940 he moved to Bogota. There he worked as a reporter and critic of film, a lasting passion. He interrupted his law studies to play journalism in the newspaper El Espectador (since 1947), where, in addition to articles and reports (such as the entitled "The truth about my adventure", based on the narrative story of a castaway), published his first stories. In fact, journalism was closely linked with his imaginative work activity and also allowed him to live long periods abroad as correspondent (so, for example, worked in 1960 for the prorrevolucionaria Cuban agency "Prensa Latina"). His journalistic production is collected in travel by the socialist countries (1957), when he was happy and undocumented (1973), coastal texts, between cops and of Europe and America (1981-1982).

The Colonel. 

His life was spent between Europe and America from 1955. First he lived in Paris, was related to the Latin American boom writers and wrote the Colonel does not who write, which was published in 1958 by the Mito magazine and whose first book Edition was carried out in 1961. Rarely, his works have been taken to the big screen, as if the often circular and rambling nature of his narrative structures and the magic of his style were an excessive challenge for filmmakers. One of the exceptions was the Colonel does not who write.

The consecration. 

After living in Caracas, Cuba, New York and Mexico, in 1965 he began to write his most important work: one hundred years of solitude, which took him eighteen months of arduous and distressing work, but which got immediate and full consecration: more than 50 successive editions in Spanish, with runs of up to one million copies, translations into many languages including the Chinese, and that Pablo Neruda said: "is the best novel that has been written in Castilian after Don Quixote". His universe is cyclical time, in which succession of fantastic stories: pests, floods, insomnia, excessive fertility, levitations. It is a great metaphor in which is the story of generations of the Buendia in the magical world of Macondo, since the founding of the village up to the complete extinction of the lineage, and which at the same time has is intractable way Colombian history, after the liberator and until the thirties of the twentieth century.

Live to tell the tale. 

In 2002 Gabriel García Márquez published a first installment of his memoirs with the title live to tell the tale. It's a fictionalized autobiography that covers a part of the life of the author (from birth through the first half of the Decade of the 1950s).

Following the usual circular structure of his other works, the book opens with the visit of his mother did when he was 23 years old, he lived in Barranquilla and was intended to be a writer. She wanted to take it to Aracataca to sell the House of grandparents. It then starts a trip to the seed that has the tone and the subject of one minor of Garcia Marquez story, and that reveals the genesis of one of his most perfect novels, litter (1955). During the encounter with the village of ghosts that had become Aracataca, he realized that this was the world which had to write.

When that family circle is closed, others open: your student in Bogota days, their practices of journalism in Medellin, ephemeral returning to her parent's House... But there's always jumps back to childhood, to shore up the present. Turning and turning, the story progresses: since is in Barranquilla collaborating assiduously but almost free in the local press and perguenando their first stories, duly Kafkaesque, until in 1956, after having published its future story of a castaway in El Espectador, for safety reasons, their heads sent to Europe. The biography is interrupted at the time of his first trip to Europe and the home, through a letter from his lifelong relationship with Mercedes Barcha.

The meaning of its title is clear in his epigraph: "life is not that one lived, but which remembers and how remembers it to tell it". The immense fame of the writer led to a first edition in all countries of speaking of a million copies. It is estimated that they paid for their rights between five and ten million dollars, but the exact amount is jealously kept secret.

HIS WORKS:

The Colonel does not who write

The title summarizes almost the plot of this novel by Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1961. Colonel (his full name we are unknown, because the author always calls him "the Colonel"), good faith and quite naive, man lives in his people waiting to receive notice that the pension granted to which she is entitled for having served in his youth under the orders of Aureliano Buendía (which will be one of the most remembered characters in one hundred years of solitude).

Hard waiting for fifteen years, during which the Colonel has continued to go to contemplate every Friday the arrival of the boat that brings the mail and distribution thereof, taking each time a disappointment.

Fernando Luján played the Colonel
in the film based on the play

In the course of the last year, since her son Augustine died bullet-riddled with bullets while he distributed illegal propaganda, the Colonel and his wife, sick from asthma, they have been forced to sell the few valuables they had to survive. Survive them and rooster, animal fight, legacy of her son, by whose fault this died, according to the mother, as it was in the cockpit where killed it.

But for the fights, in which hope to make lots of money, still takes time, and the situation is every day more harrowing. Aware that Colonel by the sale of the animal can be obtained up to nine hundred pesos, decides to sell it. But when she sees him act in training feel you can not get rid of it and renounces its sale.

To the protests of his wife, who alleges the possibility that the rooster is defeated and not gain weight, and when she asked: "Tell me, what we eat", the Colonel responds: "Shit", Word that ends the story. The very short narrative (does not reach one hundred pages of large print) has a very simple argument. What gives quality to the work is the description of your types: the Colonel, his wife, the doctor, don Sabas (the richest man of the people). Also the environment, half real, half fantastic, which permeates the work of Garcia. Marquez, gives an atmosphere of subtle poetry.

Big Mama's funeral

Published in 1962, this work of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez is a collection of short stories. Are very short stories mostly, sometimes two or three pages only, written with his peculiar style, which lead us to the world both magical and real from the imaginary village of Macondo, which already was the scene of leaf litter and will be back from his masterpiece, one hundred years of solitude.

The first story, the NAP Tuesday, narrates the journey of a mother and daughter who come to Macondo to visit the grave of their son and brother, shot dead when he tried to steal home of Mrs. Rebeca Buendía. In the second, one of these days, the dentist Aureliano Escobar starts you to living things and without anesthesia, with the excuse that the Mayor has an abscess, a tooth to its enemy: "here pay us twenty dead, Lieutenant".

In this town there are no thieves, Dámaso, young and poor, with their older and pregnant woman, to get some money he steals don Roque bar. It is only just a few cents and decides to steal the billiard balls. The next day, don Roque declared that, in addition to balls, the thief took 200 pesos. Boredom in the bar, where without balls can not play, and the remorse (a black stranger was accused of theft) make that Dámaso decide to send back them. Surprised by don Roque at the time of doing so, this claimed you the 200 pesos; "you know that there was nothing", protest Damaso, and don Roque replied: "will you get out of his skin, not so much by a thief as by gross".

In the prodigious evening of Baltazar, this profession Carpenter, built a cage, the most beautiful of few never did. The doctor wants to buy it, but Baltazar tells him that it is a custom. The son of hump Montiel was who commissioned it, but now his father doesn't want to pay the price. To the despair of the boy, Baltazar gives it is. Back home, completely drunk, he falls unconscious, and they also vulgarest you.

The widow of Montiel narrates the first times of widowhood of this woman who always lived outside reality. Her husband was rich with treason and terror, and has now become one with your imagination and fantasies. A day after the Sabbath tells us a fantastic fact; beset by the torrid heat, the birds entering houses to die. The hallucinations of the parish priest of the village and Rebeca Buendía, as well as the visit of a stranger who loses the train accompanied the story.

In artificial roses, a blind, despite his blindness, is able to "see" what happens to her granddaughter. The last tale gives title to the book: Big Mama's funeral. It relates the death and burial of María de el Rosario Castañeda y Montero (Big Mama) together with memories of his previous life, "until they have time to get the historians", building a story with great imagination and color.

One hundred years of solitude

Published in 1967, Cien Años de soledad relates the origin, evolution and the ruin of Macondo, an imaginary village which had made its appearance in the three short novels that its author had published previously. Structured as a family saga, history of the lineage of the Buendia extends for more than 100 years, and has six generations to do so.

The Chronicle of the Buendia, which accumulates a lot of fantastic, funny and violent episodes, and the Macondo, from its founding until its end, represent the full cycle of a culture and a world. The climate of violence in which their characters are developed is that mark the loneliness that characterizes them, caused more by the conditions of life by existential anxieties of the individual.

Magical realism (also called the wonderful real) makes it possible to make the objectivity of material life look softened by the subjectivity of the fantasy. The unusual (situations similar to tales of fairies, premonitions, levitation, the present extrasensorialidad) gives rise to a magical atmosphere that alleviates poverty social and human, in such a way that the magical underlines the hardness and mismatch of reality, the violence that dominates everyday life.

Argument

Two families, that of the Buendia and the Iguarán, gone by give birth to a boy with tail iguana to force to marry each other. Úrsula Iguarán, newly married to José Arcadio Buendía, refuses to marriage is consumed by fear that also born to a son with tail. This gives rise to Prudencio Aguilar cast in face José Arcadio little value. José Arcadio just killing him by his provocation, but constantly appears dead to him.

Fleeing from the ghost of the dead, and at the head of a group of companions, José Arcadio arrive at a village of just "twenty houses of mud and canabrava built on the banks of a river" and gets to live in it. This village is called Macondo, mythical stage of this and other works by the author. Are the only contact people have with the outside the periodic visits of some gypsies by a such Melquiades, who, besides knowing Sanskrit, introduced in Macondo ice and magnet.

The book starts, precisely when many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, son of José Arcadio, remember that afternoon on his father took him to discover ice. Thus begins the book, but not the story, which covers, in fact, four hundred years and informs us about countless ancestors José Arcadio and his wife Ursula, revealing in its construction, as much of the Spanish-American narrative of the moment, the influence of Faulkner: his action does not advance in chronological order, but to jump, by flashes that allow us to know fragments of it and only then , in the end, we provide a global vision.

Gabriel García Márquez

The oldest event reported in the work takes place in 1573, in a House of Riohacha assaulted by Francis Drake. After the assault on the English, an ancestor of Ursula, married to an Aragonese transplanted to Colombia, gets scared so much that it starts to suffer nightmares featuring pirate penetrating through the windows of the bedroom with their dogs. To scare away the nightmares, the marriage moves to a rancheria of the interior, where known to the Buendía, a few Criollo tobacco growers.

A great-great grandson of Creole marries a biographer of the Aragonese, and since then families will not mix his blood over the following three centuries, up to the aforementioned José Arcadio and Ursula, who have three children: José Arcadio, Aureliano and Amaranta. The old José Arcadio dies insane much study, tied to a tree in the courtyard, and after his death falls rain of flowers. This is not the only magical moment of the novel.

José Arcadio son marries Rebecca, a distant cousin, so his mother, angered by that fears that they may have children with iguana tail, take it home. When José Arcadio appears dead, Rebecca holds in the House where he will live with Arcadio, a bastard son Arcadio José has had with Pilar Ternera, a woman from the village that also a son (Aurelianus José) has given to his brother Aureliano.

Before his death was executed by liberal, this Arcadio have three children with Santa Sofía de la Piedad: remedies, José Arcadio Segundo and its twin Aureliano second. Remedies, which is beautiful but not conspicuous by their intelligence, passed to his aunt grandmother Amaranta: men who she likes do not want it, and those who want it does not like. When it dies, after being dead all the bride and groom, climb to the sky.

On Aureliano, married to a beautiful girl also called remedies, which dies a bad pregnancy before the age of one year. Aureliano organizes an army of which refers to Colonel and March to fight against the conservatives. In the course of twenty years will participate in thirty and two civil wars, which will inevitably lose due to the sadness that overwhelms you, so in the end, tired, signed peace and returns to Macondo, where time passes making fish of gold, what he did before getting married, which then melts as Penelope with your fabric. This does not prevent you have seventeen kids, one of which, called also Aureliano, is who takes the train to Macondo.

Second Aureliano falls Fernanda, a very beautiful woman, Queen of Madagascar, related to the Dukes of Alba, who appears at Macondo during Carnival. While it ignores where it lives, Aureliano second leaves in their search, finds her, marry and live happily in the House of Ursula, while marriage is in danger of shipwreck because Aureliano extra-marital relations with Petra Cook; but as this supplies them cattle, Fernanda accepts the fact without blinking. Marriage has three children: Meme, José Arcadio third (which the old Ursula sent to study in Rome so that he becomes Pope), and Amaranta Úrsula.

José Arcadio second is appointed foreman of a banana tree directed by foreign company, and is involved in a strike with three thousand companions who will die machine-gunner in Macondo station square. The only survivor of the massacre, until the death of his twin brother will live locked up in a room where you will find dozens of bacinillas.

It starts to rain, a rain that lasted four years, and when it stops doing so cattle provided by Petra has died and the House has softened. Aureliano second looking for the hypothetical old Ursula Fortune knocks down what little remains of it. The only people to whom the storm has not affected are Amaranta Úrsula, the younger daughter of Fernanda and Aureliano Babilonia, bastard of Meme. Shortly after, dies Amaranta, who has made a pact with death during a concert of Meme; then dies Rebeca and after Arcadio second. The same day, his mother, as he had promised, kill his twin, to avoid that they bury him alive.

In the House there are only Aureliano Babilonia, the bastard of Meme, that Fernanda, embarrassed, have hidden, and Fernanda, passing the time by writing to their children all the fantasies that occur to you. Next feeling death, dresses of Queen and dies with all dignity, after having written a memoir which bequeaths to the student of Pope, returning months later to Macondo without having approved the studies. This is the fortune of Ursula and spends with a group of kids, but one day gets angry, whip them and throws them out of the House. After a so-called reconciliation, the kids drown it in the bathtub during one of his parties.

Aureliano Babilonia, that reads how much falls into their hands, left alone in the House with Amaranta Úrsula, abandoned by her husband, a Belgian who dreams of airmail and that, although it will all sides attached by a thread of silk on the wrist of his wife, leaves to go in search of a lost plane. Left alone, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula, who ignore their kinship, fall in love and have a son, who was born with the usual queue. Amaranta dies of hemorrhage and Aureliano gets drunk and is picked up on the street by a former lover.

When he returns home in the morning, the ants have eaten the child. At the end, a cyclone takes the House through the air, while Aureliano read in some parchments of Melquíades Gypsy story of the family and the prophecy that will not last more than their reading time: "before reaching the final verse already had understood that no would be ever that room, as it was planned that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be ravaged by the wind and banished the memory of the men in" the moment when Aureliano Babilonia ended to decipher the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable, because strains sentenced to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on Earth".

Macondo wants to be without a doubt a mirror of reality of what takes place not only in Colombia, but in South America, who has lived in her loneliness, isolated from the rest of the world, which has only maintained sporadic contacts (Gypsies of Melquiades, who conquers it based on perfectly comparable wonders with beads and baubles that always missionaries and conquistadors were served) , but this would have little value if without your extraordinary fabulation, with all that magic that is mistaken for continuous reality, giving rise to a mythical world created through a language of great expressive force.

Story of a Castaway

Although known by the short title, the real title of this work, much longer, perfectly summarizes the history: story of a castaway who spent 10 days adrift on a raft without eating or drinking, which was proclaimed hero of the homeland, kissed by the Queens of beauty and rich by advertising, fact and then hated by the Government and forgotten for ever. Posted by deliveries in Bogotá's El Espectador in 1955 and later (in 1970) book, a novel, not a journalistic report which gives an account of an actual event.

With impeccable literary technique and professional news style, García Márquez recounts an event that occurred to a Colombian Navy sailor named Luis Alejandro Velasco. The story, painstakingly reconstructed by South American writer in the first person from the testimony of the protagonist, was tactically attributed to this in the press and only legitimized after the formidable success of one hundred years of solitude.

On February 28, 1955, eight members of the crew of the destroyer Caldas fell into the water because of the contraband that overloading the ship against lurches of wind in heavy seas. Although the Colombian dictator Rojas Pinilla Government attributed the sinking to a storm in the Caribbean, the truth is that there is no such storm and that the negligence was solely responsible for the disaster. The complaint involved the closure of the newspaper, the fall from grace of the seaman and the exile of Gabriel García Márquez in Paris.

The destroyer Caldas and his crew had spent eight months in the port of Mobile, Alabama, following repairs that took place on the ship. As it is assumed the cliché, Velasco sailor distributed his leisure between his new bride, Mary Address, and various methods to kill time with their peers, as the fights with his fists or the outputs to the cinema. Watch the movie the Caine Mutiny, the Colombian sailors experienced some concern before a storm scenes. As if it were a fictional premonition, Velasco harbored misgivings about the imminent return of the destroyer to its base in Cartagena.

The truth is that about two hundred miles from the port, overload located on the ship's deck broke because of the wind and the waves and took water to eight sailors. The misfortune wanted that Velasco was the only one who reached swimming one of the rafts dropped by the destroyer. Powerless, nothing could done by his companions, who drowned a few metres from where he was.

While the warship continued her course without stopping (had its basis in a timely manner), the Castaway waited uselessly that they rescued him quickly. On a raft to drift, devoid of food, in the company of your clock and three oars, it resisted for ten days thirst, hunger, the dangers of the sea, the scorching sun, the despair of solitude, madness, only with his instinct for survival. Although U.S. and Colombian airplanes from the Canal Zone passed very close to it, they did not locate him.

After understanding that no one could help him, and even if it wanted to death to stop suffering, survived against all odds to conditions adverse. Although he chased a Seagull could not get to eat it, and sharks snatched him a Green fish half a meter that came to catch and which only tested two mouthfuls. Neither got chop up your boots or your belt cravings, or rain made an appearance to allow you to drink. Entertained in check, on your watch, how the time was inexorable, and at night, in a kind of delirium formed by the memory and the panic to solitude, he conversed with the spirit of his partner, Jaime Manjarrés sailor.

The wreck of Velasco was a shocking experience of solitude, favorite subject in literature Gabriel García Márquez. It is not that the Castaway occupy the long hours of his misfortune in reflection, given the urgency of the situation and the delirium that submitted it. However, if they were hours devoted to the experience of itself, to the experience of the reality from the most primitive instincts and most human feelings.

After surviving a storm during the seventh day of drift, Velasco says: "After the storm the sea Sunrise blue, as in the pictures". With the effective registration of journalism, rebuilding the Odyssey of the sailor, Gabriel García Márquez strives precisely to make plausible a reality that's so amazing and terrible might appear imaginary. The efforts of the Colombian writer by returning to the world of the fiction that a priori is unlikely based his style.

Incredible is the adventure of the Castaway, also is its end. When Velasco was Earth, it still had to reach the beach to swim to not crashing against cliffs; He had to fight against the waves that returned him to the sea, had to tell their story to suspicious peasants who did not know the news of the shipwreck, and for two days, endured that they moved him in a hammock as a fair attraction by wild territories, until finally a doctor saw him and allowed him to eat normally. Awarded by the President of the Republic, he made enough money with advertising, ruined and ended up working as a clerk at a bus company.

The autumn of the Patriarch

Posted in 1980 and set in a so-called country located on the shores of the Caribbean, the autumn of the Patriarch recounts the life of a dictator who died very old, to hold on to power for more than a hundred years. Through their memories, the reader learns that he is son of a woman of the people, blessing Alvarado, only person who wanted to really; that he did not know who was his father; his early childhood was spent in misery and that became dictator, after several contentions and coups, by the will of the English.

It also tells the story of his double, Patricio Aragonés, who died in an attack, Avenged bloodily; as his most loyal Lieutenant, general Rodríguez de Aguilar, just betray him, so he commandeth that they kill him and guisen and forcing his ministers to eaten; and how already in his old age he married a kidnapped novice, Leticia Nazareno, the only woman who managed to take you to the marriage; also this and his son die in an attack, whose authors is in charge of pursuing Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, who, before general Rodríguez de Aguilar, rules with an iron hand and it has just been cruelly murdered and mutilated during an uprising instigated by the same dictator that fear.

Already in the last years of his life, the indebtedness of the country forces him to sell even the sea the "Gringos". Life is a continuous anxiety to retain power, makes something that without hesitation, as the only error that can not commit once in his life a man invested with authority and control "is to give an order that is not sure that will be fulfilled". Their repressions are cruel and total, since "any survivor is a bad enemy for life". He refuses to think of what is to come after him because "you will see, I said, will be to divide everything between the priests, the gringos and the rich, and nothing for the poor... because they will be always so messed up that the day in which the shit has some value the poor will be born without ass".

In the end, "lonelier than ever", he will die of natural death and will you enjoy your half eaten by worms. The author tries to convey to their readers the feeling of loneliness that surrounds the dictator and bring out the atrocities that can lead a power without limits.

The facts narrated in first person, by the dictator as by other characters in the novel that respectively take the floor without interruption. This and the lack of points (no point and apart, except the end of chapter), make the reading difficult many times. However the author, with his brilliant style, gets lively and colorful to the narrative and to get their message to the reader.

Chronicle of a death foretold

Published in 1981, this novel by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez based his argument on an incident during the youth of the writer: a murder for reasons of honour. Many years later the Narrator, become a chronicler and researcher of a few facts that lived closely but that did not witness, meticulously reconstructs the history, without hide at any time its denouement, which announces from the first sentence of the novel: "the day that they would be killed, Santiago Nasar rose at 5.30 in the morning..."

Gabriel García Márquez

Santiago Nasar is a 21-year-old, son of Ibrahim Nasar Arabic and Placida Linero. After a night of revelry had extended until after midnight to celebrate the marriage of Bayardo San Román and Ángela Vicario, Santiago Nasar was to the port to greet the Bishop, who then passed through the river without stopping, blessing from the ship who had gone to wait for him.

Seven and five minutes in the morning, twins Peter and Placido Vicar, brothers of the bride, had already hanging you like a pig. So ends the first chapter of the novel, consisting of five, the other four being reserved to tell the history of Ángela Vicario wedding and follow step by step, even with more detail than in the first, the adventures of Santiago Nasar overnight that killed him.

Ángela Vicario, who until then "no boyfriend is had not known him... and had grown together with her sisters under the rigor of a mother of iron", was forced by his father and brothers to marry Bayardo San Román, a man arrived to the city the previous year and that she just had seen. Bayardo was son of San Petronio Román, "hero of the civil wars of the previous century, and one of the glories of the conservative regime for having put on the run to the Colonel Aureliano Buendía" (outstanding character of one hundred years of solitude).

In the morning, just finished the wedding festivities, Bayardo returns Ángela Vicario family, because going to consummate the marriage he discovers that the bride is not a Virgin. Forced by his people to confess who has dishonored her, Angela gives the name of Santiago Nasar, possibly because "it did not think that his brothers would dare against it".

Disgrace has to be Avenged with blood, and the Vicario brothers immediately catch your knives gut pigs and go out in search of Santiago, with whom he had been drinking until shortly before. They act so bound by codes of honor, which is for them to avenge the insult, but they do not want revenge; by going where they know that Santiago will not be and telling everyone they are going to kill him, trying to encourage Santiago flight or his own detention; in both cases they would have done their duty. "The reality seemed to be that the Vicario brothers did nothing of what was appropriate to kill Santiago immediately and without public spectacle, but they did much more than was imaginable so that someone would prevent them to kill him, and did not succeed."

Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi directed a film based on the novel (1987)

To tell the truth, "there has never been a death most foretold". It was even through a role introduced under the door at the home of the victim; a role that nobody saw or didn't see, until after occurring facts. There were also other circumstances which made that death occurs. Santiago, who always entered and left his house through the back door, that did day by the principal, where the Vicario brothers, who knew everyone who never wore it, as were waiting so that everyone would see them. The door was still open when Santiago, warned from a balcony of the vicar came to kill him, sought refuge in the House; but at the last moment, believing that already had entered, they closed the door from the inside, and the vicar had not forced to sink their knives in the amazed Santiago.

Only left the victim forces drag, with casings outside, into the kitchen of his house and dying. Many things remain unclear; among them, if it is true that was Santiago who dishonored Angela, thing that she always said, although without too much conviction.

From the time that Bayardo San Román returned to his people, Ángela Vicario, who had married him without being in love, felt "being in his life forever". Long after Bayardo San Román saw in a hotel of Riohacha and, without being able to resist it, wrote a letter "in which told her that he had seen him leaving the hotel, and that he would have liked that he had seen it".

While there is no response, Angela continues to write you, first a letter a month, and then a week, for half a lifetime. Finally, Bayardo San Román returned with her: "Was carrying the suitcase of clothes to stay, and another equal suitcase with nearly two thousand letters that she had written to him... sorted by their dates, sewn with ribbons of colors and all unopened packs".

Away from the features of magic realism, the Chronicle of a death foretold is a fast novel, step by step, following almost chronometrically, events, with a great wealth in the characterization of the characters and the rest of its production-like environment; the same as the language, perhaps less Baroque than in previous occasions. It especially excels by its constructive perfection: the narrative material is available so that, despite advertising the outcome on the first page, keeps on tenterhooks during throughout the novel the reader; only in the last chapter one gets to understand the combination of fatal circumstances that led to a crime so easily preventable and no one wanted to.

Love in the time of cholera

Published in 1985, this novel by Gabriel García Márquez devoted to the love begins with two deaths: Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, an Antillean invalid of war refugee, and doctor Juvenal Urbino, returning from the House of his friend, suicide, in his attempt to retrieve a parrot fled, sought refuge in the courtyard of his handle, falling from the top and is killed. "Only God knows how much I loved you", has barely time to say to Fermina Daza, his wife, the same who a while later, Florentino Ariza, one of those attending the wake, will say: "Fermina: I've waited this time for more than half a century, to repeat once again my eternal loyalty oath and my love forever".

This is a Sunday of Pentecost in the early 1930s, a Colombian city on the coast of the Caribbean that due to its proximity to the mouth of the Magdalena river, we might suppose that it is inspired in Barranquilla; at a time that we will not recover until you have read three hundred long pages of this novel that reaches the five hundred.

Three hundred pages through which we are witnessing, in large part, to the "sentimental education" of Florentine, in love, while still a teenager, Fermina daza, who barely crosses word but yes keeps one very large and passionate correspondence. At the turn of a journey through the interior, tax Fermina Daza by his father (who wants to take it away from her lover), he realizes suddenly that Florentino Ariza is not the man who can make her happy and rejects him, marrying the doctor Urbino, who refused at first. Although relatively happy, Fermina Daza will soon realize their mistake; It has rejected the man who wanted to and carried by a foreign destination, has delivered you do not want to.

Gabriel García Márquez

While this happens, cholera is raging and the wars between Liberals and conservatives, occur without compromising this Caribbean city life too. Florentino Ariza, despite continue wanting to Fermina, moves from woman on woman, adventure in adventure, at the time that jobs in the family company of waterway, of which end up being President.

Dead Urbino, and again rejected by Fermina, Florentino Ariza will again, as it did in adolescence, to write, to conquer little by little with his verb passionate woman, who will first accept his friendship and then travel by the Magdalena river on one of the ships of the company, not knowing until the last moment, Florentino to accompany it.

It will be in the rio Magdalena where these old people, who already spend seventies, will be handed to his love, so passionately that, to get rid of witnesses and remain alone in the boat, Florentino will do in the return trip was flying the yellow flag of cholera and, once arrived to the mouth, and therefore to the city return to go up the river; a cupcake dead, due to excessive logging of the rainforest, whereby lower bodies, shot in the nape of the neck, or victims of cholera, since the time of cholera have not lagged behind, despite the health authorities across. Nor has fallen behind love, since love is love "at any time and anywhere, but much denser the more approaches to death".

With visions of death, which fail to overcome the love, just as he began this novel that cross many characters who snatched his protagonism to the pair of lovers, that only with Urbino share at any time. Much more linear that others by the same author, poetry is not born of those magical elements to which both we are accustomed García Márquez, although also missing some (black doll that increases in size, Florentine eating Roses), but on the strength of their topic: love, actor absolute construction, wrapped up, sometimes by much more magical scenery as it may be more surprising and strange happenings and other phenomena.

Strange pilgrims

Published in 1992, this collection of stories of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez had a strange genesis: were inspired by a dream you had when he was living in Barcelona. "I dreamed that you attending my own funeral, on foot, walking among a group of friends... solemn mourning dresses," has the author.

Fortunately for readers, it was not a premonitory dream. But if that aura of deep melancholy that pervades the worlds of Garcia Marquez and that is so exactly embodied in the first of the tales, good trip, Mr President, whose tenderness atmosphere surrounds the loneliness of an old Caribbean ruler who has returned to Geneva to seek medical solution to the pains that have announced. They just give you a diagnosis and sits on the shores of the Lake ("always thinking of death, when he started the autumn") until aterido, takes refuge in the cafeteria where a string quartet plays a premonitory Mozart.

There take a coffee, skipping medical prescriptions and sl exit, discovers that someone follows you. Calls it: a driver for ambulances from the hospital where he visited a compatriot, Homer King of the House, is. They eat together and, next Thursday, Homer invites the President to dinner at her house.

The economic situation of Homer and Lazara, his wife, is precarious. They thought that they could get some out of their relationship, but, ultimately, they will be those who help the elderly President. When he leaves the hospital, already operated, they collect at home and caring for it a few months until finally, more or less restored, moved to Marseille to ship back to the Caribbean.

Stories that all of them are self-employed, follow, but form a unit based on the structure, rhythm, style and the character of some of the characters, through which hinted at the deep development of each story. The santa, a father tries to the Pope to sanctify his daughter and trajina his body, which is preserved miraculously incorrupt by Rome. The corpse terrorizes a prostitute and the mistress of the House, which is taken by the ghost of a German officer's mistress. No one believes in the Prodigy, except the filmmaker Zavattini, who thinks that the subject would give to make a great film, but must face the resistance of assistants and producers: "Is what most pisses me off of the Stalinists, who do not believe in reality". But the Stalinists are not the only ones. Margarito Duarte, father, consumed his life in Rome, arriving to attend the death of five popes, while none of them nor their empty promises will make it possible that the Vatican accept to canonize the dead girl.

In the plane of the sleeping beauty, the enigmatic Frau Frida lives in Vienna of his unique craft, rented for dream, and when she and Pablo Neruda match in Barcelona, both dream of each other with the other. This trait so own the subject of Garcia Marquez, to dive into the mind beyond the usual limits of consciousness and the unconscious, also characterized "Just came to talk on the phone", a dramatic story in which the girl protagonist, Maria, enters a mental hospital for talking on the phone, and kafkianamente, is held there.

Common feature, also, of all the stories gathered in these strange pilgrims is its unique perspective, a peculiar way of looking at that, the same that the author, makes the reader ask where life ends and where imagination begins. But in this uncertain limit between reality and fiction in which García Márquez goes, the reader, once again, is seduced by his narrative mastery.

Memories of my melancholy whores

In these memories of my melancholy whores (2004), Gabriel García Márquez tells the story of a longtime journalist who, at age 90, decides to celebrate its anniversary with a virgin girl of 14 years. To get it resorted to his old acquaintance, Rosa Cabarcas, owner of a brothel frequented for many years.

A few days, get the girl. In the first meeting, Delgadina is sedated by the midwife, so you lose the fear. Then, the old man finds asleep and is dedicated to contemplate it.

The peculiar relationship lasts for a year and will make you remember the past, the career of journalist, the love of music, favorite books and taste for the shit. Also, as anyone who loves, you will increase your activity to flatter her; with these influences, motivations and a new love, that will give meaning to the end of its existence, may face the inevitable.

The book then addresses the peculiar love of an old. At a certain age, the force is exhausted you. However, there is emotion in the heart. At that time, the old man seeks to have a relationship and in doing so realizes that love does not pass, as many men believe, only by intercourse, but it can also occur through the caress, contemplation and silence. The new form allows you to admire the irresistible beauty of the other, i.e., the magnificence of life itself in the realm of the imagination. Longtime journalist says: "that night, discovered the pleasure that is unlikely to see the body of a woman asleep without the constraints of desire or shame clogs". The fascination for the beloved moves to the old man, full of fantasies and allows you to hide the fear of death, as well as face the decrepitude.

History recalls, by its brevity and the intense plot, the Colonelis who write. Realistic nature, the removal of the "magical realism" is total. The result is a direct, intimate and, of course, sad story.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas