The legacy of Gabriel García Márquez ten years after his death

This Wednesday marks ten years since the death of one of the greatest writers who has given rise to literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquezcreator of a genre called ‘magical realism’ that permeated the work of many writers who followed him. And he left as a legacy that poetic Macondo that continues to enchant readers.

Because in these ten years interest in the Colombian writer has not waned, of whom an unpublished novel was published a little over a month ago, ‘See you in August’ (Random House), where he worked until his strength allowed him to.

After ‘Memories of my sad whores’ in 2004, García Márquez (Aracataca, Colombia, 1927-Mexico City, 2014) spent almost ten years working on a book that he wanted destroyed, but that his sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, decided publish because they considered that if their father had wanted to destroy it, he would have done so.

It is the closing of the brilliant career of one of the most relevant authors of the 20th century, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and from whose imagination essential works such as ‘One hundred years of solitude’‘A Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, ‘The colonel has no one to write to him’ or ‘Big Mama’s Funerals’.

Works that have continued to sell at a good pace since his death, especially in the paperback and illustrated editions, as explained to EFE by the Random House publishing house, which has the rights to Gabo’s books in Spanish for the entire world with the exception of Mexico and Central America.

The poetry that exudes his works continues to captivate readers. Because García Márquez gave a very particular style to all of his works, whether as a novelist, journalist or film scriptwriter, some of the facets of this Colombian who was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, and who spent more than fifty years years in Mexico.

That municipality in the Colombian Caribbean where he was born served as inspiration for that Macondo in which his stories developed, which largely came from his own family.

Son of Gabriel Eligio García, telegrapher and apothecary, and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarñan, Gabo was inspired by their love story, which her father opposed, to write ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’.

His grandfather’s nine extramarital children, his sister Aida Rosa’s habit of eating dirt, the grandmother who divined the future or the numerous relatives with the same names, were elements that appeared in one way or another in his novels.

He wrote from a very young age and his love for writing led him to abandon his law studies. And at only 21 years old he began to collaborate in El Universal de Cartagena, while publishing his first stories.

He continued his work as a journalist in various media when he published his first two novels, ‘Litter’ (1955) and ‘The Colonel has no one to write to him’ (1961), this when he had already settled in Mexico, which became his second homeland.

It was then that he focused on literature and dedicated two years to writing ‘One hundred years of solitude’ (1967), which immediately established him as one of the great authors of the moment.

And as a precursor of ‘Latin American boom’, along with authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, one of his great friends during his time in Barcelona – from 1967 to 1973 – and whose relationship ended abruptly in 1976 due to a punch that the Peruvian gave him and that, with more or less plausible theories, remains a mystery.

A cultural agitator by conviction, García Márquez had the soul of a reporter, as he demonstrated in his many articles or in that gem called ‘News of a Kidnapping’. And his importance was confirmed when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

In its ruling, the Swedish Academy indicated that the Nobel went to García Márquez “for his novels and short stories in which the fantastic and the real are combined in a universe richly composed of imagination that reflects the life and conflicts of the American continent.”

Because García Márquez expressed many of his social and political concerns in his books, and his leftist ideology caused him problems and led him to exile.

Awarded and awarded on multiple occasions, he stated in 1994 that he did not want to receive the Cervantes Prize for Literature. He had already won the Nobel Prize and wanted to leave room for other authors.

What he never rejected was writing. Because, as she said in her memoir published in 2002: “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it to tell it.”

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