Aracataca (Colômbia), 1927 – Cidade do México (México), 2014
By Flávio Aguiar
Among the cast of great storytellers that Latin America has revealed to the literary world in the last six decades is this Colombian writer and journalist, one of the most active and popular intellectual personalities worldwide. A landmark in the narrative of the marvelous real, the Nobel Prize in Literature (1982) established with the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the central pillar for a literature that merges in the multiple universe near the Caribbean the musicality of the Spanish language with the magical world of its mestizo peoples, direct or indirect heirs of indigenous, Black, and European cultures.
Following the saga of the Buendía family, from the imaginary town of Macondo, his body of work includes other novels, short stories, chronicles, children’s tales, reports, articles, and participation in a Spanish language dictionary—one of the author’s linguistic obsessions. His narrative of a family saga aligns him with the Brazilian Érico Veríssimo, whose Time and the Wind was one of his readings. Much of his work was developed alongside a journalistic career he began in his country in the late 1940s, after abandoning law school.
In both fiction and journalism, he expressed his left-wing ideological stance, politically engaging through texts circulated in mass media and through a diverse range of intellectual activities, such as founding the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI) in Cartagena de Indias. He was active in political and cultural movements across Latin America and in institutions dedicated to human rights. He maintained strong ties to cinema, conducting workshops on film and television scriptwriting in Cuba at the International School of Cinema and Television (EICTV), which he helped found.
He passed on the values of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which he received for the novel The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, to the Venezuelan group Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and the Committee of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. He joined the complex effort to bring together the two factions of Colombian power: government leaders and guerrilla movement heads in the 1980s.
Alongside Alejo Carpentier, he stands as a master of the literary genre born in avant-garde movements and continued through the 1960s, blending reality and magic with elements of humor and irony. Márquez often focused on military dictatorships, as shown in the fictional account of the fall of three Hispanic American rulers in The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). He left Colombia in the early 1980s due to political disagreements with the military government of Julio César Turbay.
At the beginning of the 21st century, he published part of his memoirs in Living to Tell the Tale (2002). His literary-journalistic career reinforces this tradition in the Hispanic American scene and dialogues with figures like Rodolfo Walsh, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Elena Poniatowska, and Carlos Fuentes.
Among his awards are the Esso Prize (1961), an honorary doctorate from Columbia University in New York (1971), and the French government’s Legion of Honor medal (1981).
In 2004, he published what would be his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. The following year, he gave his final interview, saying that 2005 was the first year of his life in which he had not written anything. Suffering from senile dementia, he gradually lost his memory. He died on April 17, 2014, in Mexico City, at the age of 87. He left an unpublished work, the novel In August We’ll See Each Other.
Other works: Viva Sandino (1982); Love in the Time of Cholera (1985); Press Notes (1980-1984); The Blessed Madness of Storytelling (1998).
