• HIS CHILDHOOD AND BIOGRAPHICAL GLIMPSES
• AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
• NOTES

Born: 6 March 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia

Married: Mercedes Barcha, March 1958

Education: Attended Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1947-1948, and Universidad de Cartagena, 1948-1949

Gabriel García Márquez is the most widely read novelist writing in Spanish and the most critically acclaimed in his native Colombia, in Latin America, and, some have argued, in the world. His best-known novel, Cien anos de soledad (1967; translated as, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), introduced readers to the technique of “magic realism,” the mixture of fantasy and actuality for which this author has become known. In the magic realism of García Márquez, nature defies reason and logic, but always in the service of his profoundly humane worldview. He calls himself a “realist,” adding that “reality is not restricted to the price of tomatoes.”¹

When One Hundred Years of Solitude was applauded as, at last, “the great American novel,” García Márquez modestly demurred. “The great American novel,” he argued, “was written by Herman Melville.”² He was referring, of course, to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). “I am a writer through timidity,” he has remarked, minimizing his storytelling mastery, “my real vocation is that of a conjurer.”³

The Hundred Years of Solitude was followed by a series of master works, El otono del patriarca (1975; translated as The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), which García Márquez considers his most personal book, his most artful and most complex; Cronica de una muerte anunciada (1982; translated as Chronicle Of A Death Foretold, 1982), a novella-length work that provides a microcosm of Colombian society; and El amor en los tiempos del colera (1985; translated as Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), an elegiac hymn to the love between his parents. Meanwhile, García Márquez continued to practice the craft with which he began, that of the journalist. He honed his craft on American models rather than from the local examples, which he has said were “very heavy then, academic, classic, very Spanish.”⁴ His themes have included the loneliness of solitude, its selfishness and its solace, the need for human solidarity, and the dangerous temptation of nostalgia. Those who are spiritually defeated in his novels, such as the Buendia clan in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Simon Bolivar in the historical novel, El general en su laberinto (1989; translated as The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), have sacrificed selflessness and connection to the community for their own desires, dreams, and ambitions.

Yet, solitude can be a comfort, as it is for the alter ego of García Márquez, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, who makes an appearance in several of his books. The Colonel, who haunts the fiction of García Márquez, in retirement from the civil wars between the Liberals and Conservatives that have revealed to him only the futility of the quest for power, fashions tiny fishes out of gold. Only in his laboratory does Colonel Aureliano Buendia discover a refuge from war, madness, and pain.

García Márquez has been a political man, a socialist, and man of the Left, as much as he has been a writer; however, he has never joined a political party. Instead he has called himself an “anti-colonial Latin American.”⁵ In the late 1970s he refused an invitation to run for the presidency of Colombia (unlike his fellow novelist and biographer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran for the presidency of Peru and lost). García Márquez has also refused ambassadorships.

“I am an emergency politician,” he has declared. “If I were not a Latin American, I would not be in politics. But how can the intellectual enjoy the luxury of debating the destiny of the soul when the problems are of physical survival, health, education, ignorance and so on?”⁶ Having lived in New York City as a correspondent for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina in 1960, he has remarked that the people of the United States “will be the ones to create a great socialist revolution, and a good one too “⁷ He has called New York “the greatest phenomenon of our time “⁸

He has been an international man, and by the time he was forty-three years old he had lived for three years in Spam, for one in Rome, for two or three in Pans, and for seven or eight in Mexico He continues to believe that “it’s very important for a Latin American writer to view Latin America from Europe at some given moment “Nor has it mattered to him where he lives He has always found people who interested him, “whether in Barranquilla, Rome, Pans or Barcelona “⁹

He considers himself a man of imagination “Anyone who doesn’t contradict himself is a dogmatist,” he has said “And every dogmatist is a reactionary”¹⁰ He has, however, taken many political stands He was active in the campaign of President Omar Torrijos to persuade the United States to grant Panama sovereignty over the canal, he helped the Sandinistas of Nicaragua by serving as an intermediary for them with other governments, he has “conspired,” as he put it, to promote peace talks between warring factions in El Salvador, and he has been an intermediary between the Colombian government and the guerrilla movements

As were other Latin American artists, he was dismayed when in 1971 Fidel Castro jailed poet Herberto Padilla for his views Padilla was forced to make a Stalinist-style confession before he was released Other novelists broke with Cuba, but García Márquez termed Castro’s action a “mistake” and vowed to combat such evils “from the inside “He noted that it was “only when there were problems with intellectuals in Cuba that intellectuals began to break with Cuba, and I think this is politically immature “¹¹

He has also observed that since “intellectuals consider themselves the moral conscience of society,” their perspective generally follows “moral rather than political channels “He distinguishes himself from such writers “I think I am the most politicized of them all,” he has said Of his personal views, he has said he believes “the world ought to be socialist, that it will be, and that we should help this to happen as quickly as possible “As for the socialism practiced in the former Soviet Union, he was adamant “that isn’t socialism “¹²

In 1974 he helped found a magazine in Bogota called Alternative, to which he contributed political journalism, including articles on the liberation of Angola and the last days of President Salvador Allende of Chile, overthrown and killed in a military coup in 1973

The magazine folded in 1980, partly because it refused to accept advertising; that a bomb had exploded in the offices was also a decided setback. Over the years García Márquez has continued to write journalism, arguing that there is no essential difference between one form of writing and another. In the early 1980s, however, he requested political asylum from Mexico. The guerrillas of the populist faction M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril; 19th of April Movement) had boasted that he was financing their activities and his name had been marked for arrest by the government of Colombia.

In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The previous year he had told the Paris Review that winning the Nobel would be “an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but to receive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame.” He went on to remark, “The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter.”¹³

HIS CHILDHOOD AND BIOGRAPHICAL GLIMPSES

Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1928 in Aracataca, a dusty Caribbean village between Barranquilla and Santa Marta in what was once the banana zone; it was settled by people who had fled the civil wars that beset Colombia for a century. The town had been built by the United Fruit Company with wooden shacks and roofs made of zinc and tin. His father, Gabriel Eligio Garcia, however, later contended that his eldest son, the first of sixteen children, was in fact born in 1927. García Márquez has remarked, “no one knows for sure.”¹⁴

His father was a telegraph operator. His mother, Luisa Santiago Marquez Iguaran, was of a higher social status; her father, who had been a colonel in the civil wars, opposed the marriage because Gabriel Eligio Garcia was a Conservative, was illegitimate, and was known to have been with many women. They would be married for sixty years.

Just prior to Gabriel’s birth, his mother came home to Aracataca from Riohacha, where she and her husband had settled. “Come have the baby in our house,” her parents pleaded. Then they added, “Leave Gabriel with us to raise.”¹⁵

It was a commonplace practice of the Caribbean for grandparents to raise a child when the parents were poor. He was left to be raised by his grandparents and aunts in a large rambling house in the hot dusty town of Aracataca, the model for the town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

His maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Marquez, had fathered more than a dozen illegitimate children and had served in the civil wars. He was, García Márquez has said, “the person I’ve gotten along with best and had the best communication with ever.”¹⁶ His grandfather took him to the circus and to the cinema and, he has said, “was my umbilical cord with history and reality.”¹⁷ “The guardian angel of my infancy was an old man — my grandfather.”¹⁸ Yet, he knew his grandfather had killed a man. Once, taking his grandson Gabriel to the circus, the colonel had stopped to exclaim: “Oh! You don’t know how much a dead man weighs.”¹⁹

His maternal grandmother, Tranquilina Iguaran, was addicted to telling fables and family legends and organizing his life according to the messages she received in her dreams. Her stories did not distinguish between the living and the dead. She was his “source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality.”²⁰ Growing up among adults, he drew comic strips and cartoons before he could even write. His earliest recollection was of drawing these comics, which illustrated the stories his grandmother told him.

Once, when his mother came to visit, he walked into a room where many women were sitting. He did not know which one was his mother. “She wore a dress from the twenties with a low waistline and a straw hat,” he remembered later. “Then she embraced me and I became very frightened because I felt I didn’t love her.”²¹ It seemed evil to the boy not to love his mother.

His grandfather died when he was eight years old; García Márquez later remarked, “Desde entonces no me ha pasado nada interesante” (Since then nothing interesting has happened to me).²² He left the Montessori School in Aracataca in 1936 and returned to the house of his parents, who were now living in Sucre. He did not remain for long.

“I was living in a house where a new child was born every year,” he later recalled. By the time he was thirteen years old, he must have had “about eight brothers.”²³ He decided then that the only solution for him was to leave, both for his own survival and to lighten the daily burden of his family. He went as a boarding student to the Colegio de San Jose in Barranquilla. He was already a studious boy who shunned athletics and had been writing poetry from the age of ten. When he transferred to the “Colegio de Jesuitas,” he was so serious that he became known as “the Old Man.”

In 1940 he left Barranquilla to go to Bogota to take the examinations for a scholarship. He studied at the Liceo Nacional in Zipa-quira, a high school for the gifted near Bogota. At once he hated living in the interior, with its cold weather and the repressive culture.

He was shocked by Bogota, where he found the men all dressed in black, wearing hats, and where there were no women in the streets. All his life he would consider it his great “good fortune” to have been born on the Caribbean coast rather than in Bogota where, he says wryly in Love in the Time of Cholera, it has been drizzling since the year one. The cold offended him.

García Márquez writes in his coda to The General in His Laby-rinth that as a student returning home on school vacations and holidays, he “sailed the [Magdalena] river eleven times in both directions, traveling on steamboats that came out of the shipyards of the Mississippi already condemned to nostalgia and possessed of a mythic call that no writer could resist.”²⁴ He later set Love in the Time of Cholera in the Caribbean city he has called the most beautiful in the world, Cartagena de Indias, the walled city where Sir Francis Drake plied his “pirate” trade, as García Márquez calls it, and where neither Europe nor the United States are particularly noticed. Its beauty is introverted.

He only returned to Aracataca once, at the age of sixteen, when his grandmother died and he and his mother returned to sell the family home. This trip inspired him to begin his great novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, whose first title was “La Casa” (The House).

After receiving his bachillerato (high-school diploma) in 1946, he headed for the Universidad Nacional in Bogota. There he planned to study law, since law and medicine were the usual occupations for bright young men of his class. Then he read the fiction of Franz Kafka and dis-covered a type of literature different from that he had been taught in secondary school.” In 1946 or 1947 a friend loaned to him a book of Kafka’s short stories. He began with The Metamorphosis (1915):

The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” When I read the line I thought to myself that 1 didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”²⁵

He has said that Kafka made him want to write, that at eight o’clock the next morning, he set out to explore the history of fiction from the Bible to the present.

In his freshman year at the Universidad Nacional he published his first story, “La tercera resignacion” (The Third Resignation), about a boy who lives for eighteen years in a coffin. It won a contest sponsored by the El Especdador newspaper and was published in its Sunday supplement. The literary editor, Eduardo Zalamea Borda, proclaimed young “Gabito,” as he was called by his friends, “the new genius of Colombian letters!” People told him his work had “Joycean influences.”²⁶

These comments amused García Márquez, who had never read the works of the Irish author James Joyce. He began to read Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) and discovered the technique of the interior monologue. When he later read the work of British writer Virginia Woolf, he found he liked “the way she uses it better than Joyce.”²⁷ He also discovered that the writer who really invented this technique was the author of the anonymous Spanish picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). In the next six years García Márquez published ten short stories in El Especdador. His law studies at the Universidad Nacional were interrupted by the assassi-nation on 9 April 1948 of Liberal politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, who had become well known for his inquiry into the banana-zone strike of 1928. The boarding house in which García Márquez was living caught on fire in the upheaval and chaos of “el Bogotazo,” the riots that followed the death of the popular leader. The university was shut down, and García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. Once again he was a costeno, a man of the coast.

In Cartagena someone told him he needed “a foundation,” and so he began to read the works of the ancient Greeks, Sophocles in particular, the influence of his Antigone can be discerned in the first novel of García Márquez, La hojarasca (1955, translated in Leaf Storm and Other Stones, 1972), with its narrative of a community refusing to bury a body Of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, García Márquez has said, “It’s a perfect structure, wherein the investigator discovers that he is himself the assassin an apotheosis of technical perfection “²⁸ He also read more of William Faulkner, discovering that “his world —the world of the southern United States was very like my world it was created by the same people “He has called Faulkner “a Latin American writer His world is that of the Gulf of Mexico “²⁹

He also began to write a five-hundred-word column for El Universal, a newspaper His topics ranged from parrots to twins to astrology In 1949 he contracted pneumonia and was bedridden for several months There was nothing to do but read, and he read, voraciously, the works of Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce, and Woolf

In 1950 he moved to Barranquilla, where he was part of the “Barranquilla group” of young intellectuals led by Ramon Vinyes, an erudite Catalonian book dealer and writer Every day he would debate with three young reporters at Vinyes’s bookshop “We would argue at the top of our voices,” German Vargas, one of his fellow reporters, later recalled ³⁰ García Márquez was now writing a column for the El Heraldo newspaper, which was called “La Jirafa” (The Giraffe) He signed it “Septimus,” after Septimus Warren Smith, a character in Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925)

In the afternoons he worked on Leaf Storm Extremely poor, he lived upstairs in a brothel on a street called Calle del Crimen (Street of Crime) and became acquainted with the prostitutes, who were later to figure in his fiction He remained on El Heraldo until 1952 The following year, 1953, he quit journalism briefly, working at several jobs —he even sold encyclopedias, an experience enlivened by the fact that on one of his forays he met the grandson of the man his grandfather had murdered

In February of 1954, García Márquez moved to Bogota to work on El Especdador He became the first regular movie critic in Colombia and the first there to praise French motion-picture director Francois Truffaut’s landmark Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) work, The Four Hundred Blows (1959) In 1955 García Márquez wrote the serialized nonfiction account of a Colombian Navy sailor named Luis Alejandro Velasco, the only survivor of several crewmen of the destroyer Caldas who were swept overboard in heavy seas; originally published in El Espectador, the tale later appeared in book form as Relato de un naufrago (1970; translated as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, 1986). The El Espectador serial became controversial when Velasco revealed that his ship had foundered because the vessel had been overloaded with contraband.

Because of the reaction to the Velasco account, it seemed politically expeditious for García Márquez to leave town, and El Espectador sent him to Europe to cover a Big Four conference and to Rome in anticipation of the death of the ailing Pope Pius XII, who did not in fact die until 1958. He enrolled for a short time at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinema, where he studied cinema, prefiguring his later interest in screenwriting. In 1956 he moved to Paris. His job as a foreign correspondent came to an end because back in Colombia the dictator Rojas Pinilla shut down El Espectador.

In Paris he spent his time writing; sometimes all he had to live on was the money he made returning bottles for their deposits, and he depended on the kindness of a landlady who allowed him to stay in her attic.

He lost weight. He sent his mother a photograph and she replied, “Poor Gabito. He looks like a skeleton.”³¹ He returned to South America —not to Colombia, but to Venezuela, where he worked on Momento and other magazines.

García Márquez proposed to Mercedes Barcha, a pharmacist, before he left for Europe; they were married in March of 1958. He has insisted that he does not even now know exactly how old she is, that there is “a secret part of every personality never revealed to anyone.”³²

Their first son, Rodrigo, was born in 1959.

When Rodrigo was born, there was an immediate problem. García Márquez was an atheist. Yet, in order for a child to be officially registered in Colombia, he had to be baptized. Then García Márquez remembered his old classmate at the National University, Camilo Torres Restrepo, who was a priest. García Márquez knew that Torres was “different from other priests.”

García Márquez had met Torres in 1947 at the law school, although neither went on to practice law. García Márquez remembers that “everyone was interested in politics at that time, some from the point of view of poetry, some from the point of view of sociology, everyone except Camilo,” who would become the most important political figure in Colombia of his day. They were both on the staff of the university magazine, La Raison. The whole experience of the university had been a revelation for García Márquez; as he remarked, he “came from the coast,” and so “wasn’t acquainted with the whole social mechanism of the city.”

Torres decided to become a priest and ran away from home to join the seminary at Chinquinquira, only to have his mother pursue him and drag him back from the station. When García Márquez visited Torres at his home a few days later, however, Torres told him that he was still going to be a priest, but he was joining a different order, one more affluent and closer to home. Torres gave him as a going-away present a book from his library, a translation of A Short History of the World (1922) by H. G. Wells, in what García Márquez calls “a rustic edition.”

When García Márquez went to work on El Espectador, in Bogota, Torres was ordained. His friends were amazed because they were used to another kind of priest. Father Camilo Torres was neither overtly saintly or obsessive. Anything could be discussed with him. “How strange,” García Márquez had told Torres when he first joined the seminary, “the last thing I would have thought of was that you would have wanted to become a priest” Once, talking to Torres about another priest, Garcia Marquez had remarked, casually, “Oh, he’s the kind of priest who believes in God “Torres bridled” Wait a minute I believe in God too “Yes, you do, but you don’t look like you do,” Garcia Marquez told him

A priest who smoked cigars, frequented cafes, and drew the admiration of women attracted the attention of Garcia Marquez He was happy to know a priest like this, even as, in his fiction, he ponders the kind of man that women like This pondering is a theme that runs through his work and culminates in Love in The Time Of Cholera Tones lacked sensuality, and even seemed cold, at first appearance, but the attraction he exerted was exceptional

Garcia Marquez’s sister Licia lived with them When Torres visited, she would lock herself in her room because she felt there was something “wrong with her” She was sinning in being so attracted to a man who was a priest, a similar motif appears in Chronicle of a Death Foretold where the sister of the narrator, who is a nun, is also worldly and gets drunk If Garcia Marquez at times seems anticlerical in his fiction, not least in his depiction of the bishop in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, who refuses to set foot on land and baptize anyone, but stops only to collect cockscombs for his soup, it is in part because there was no priest Garcia Marquez could admire except his friend Camilo Tones

One day Tones turned up at Garcia Marquez’s house for lunch, as he did often He told Mercedes and Gabo about a young man who was a cat burglar He wanted to rehabilitate himself, but the problem was when people would help by giving him clothes, the police would recognize him in the street and conclude that what he was wearing had been stolen He would be arrested yet again It seemed almost a plot from a Garcia Marquez story

Accepting Torres’s recommendation, Garcia Marquez and his wife took the cat burglar under their wing Garcia Marquez wrote a “testimonial,” a certificate for the cat burglar so that when he was given anything, the police would not accuse him of having stolen it One day the maid arrived and opened the newspaper “These are your husband’s shoes1” she told Mercedes In the newspaper was a photograph of the cat burglar, who had been killed wearing a pair of shoes Garcia Marquez had given him He had been carrying his certificate, but he was still killed for wearing the shoes

Torres agreed to baptize Rodrigo only because Mercedes persuaded him that she at least believed in God and would superintend the child’s religious upbringing It was September of 1959, nine months after the Cuban revolution, and like many Latin American writers and intellectuals, Garcia Marquez was a supporter of Fidel Castro

The chosen godfather was a Communist “We are going to make of this child a revolutionary and a guerrilla fighter,” he announced The woman who was to be the godmother admitted that she was not all too sure of the existence of God Torres was angry “All you people think about is guns and war,” he declared “We’re going to make him a soldier of Christ “

At the chapel, Torres said, “I’m going to baptize him in Spanish so all you atheists and communists will know what this is about “Garcia Marquez believes this may have been the first baptism in Spanish in Colombia, because it was still illegal prior to the reforms of Vatican II that in 1963 allowed the liturgy to be performed in the vernacular rather than Latin

“He who believes that the body of Christ is now entering this child should kneel,” said Torres, according to the baptismal ritual No one knelt, except for an Indian man who happened to be standing at the door of the chapel Torres poured the water and concluded the baptism Then, when they were all out in he street, he expressed his fury “You are a bunch of sons-of-bitches You could have knelt at least out of good manners,” he told them “No,” Garcia Marquez answered, “because it was a challenge on your part”³³

Torres, both an activist and a leading figure in “liberation theology,” became a national leader in Colombia, arguably the most popular political figure in the country When his life was threatened by the government and it seemed impossible that his movement, Frente Umdo (United Front), could ever take power, he joined the main leftist guerrilla organization, the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN, Army of National Liberation) Camilo Torres died in combat against the Colombian army in February of 1966

In 1960 Garcia Marquez lived for six months in Havana, working for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina He moved to New York City to open a Prensa Latina office there and found himself threatened by Cuban exiles He kept an iron pipe beside his desk and was not deterred when, while he was driving to his home in Queens, a car drew up alongside, and he spotted a gun pointed at him He left the news agency only when Jorge Massetti, the friend who had gotten him the job, was fired as Cuba was being taken over by the old Communist Party cadre Garcia Marquez resigned in solidarity and wound up in Mexico City working for the J. Walter Thompson Agency and other advertising agencies to support his family. In Mexico City he wrote the book that changed his life, One Hundred Years of Solitude. His second son, Gonzalo, was born there in 1962.

To escape the tumult of his extraordinary success, in October of 1967 he moved to Barcelona, where he became friends with Mario Vargas Llosa, who later wrote what remains the only true biography of the novelist, García Márquez: Historia de un Deicidio (García Márquez: Story of a Deicide, 1971). He was in Spain to observe the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco up close, in preparation for his next book. The atmosphere of Spain under Franco was so cold and repressive, so unlike what he needed, that he returned to the Caribbean for a year, capturing the taste of the indigenous dictatorships. He planned to write this book in one year. It took seven. The Autumn of the Patriarch was published in 1975, the year of Franco’s death.

Because he had worked for the Cuban news agency, after 1960 the United States government refused to grant García Márquez a visa to enter the country. When he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Columbia University in 1971, because of his politics he was given only a “conditional” or provisional visa, which required an official invitation, with restrictions. In 1984 he was invited to attend a discussion of United States policies in Central America, but because once more he was offered only one of these provisional visas, he refused to participate. His reasons were “principle and personal dignity.”

Throughout his career, both in his journalism and in his fiction, García Márquez has been a writer with a pronounced worldview. He believes life would be happier were people to resist the twin temptations of solitude and nostalgia. “[T]he whole disaster of Macondo,” he has said, “comes from this lack of solidarity—the solitude which results when everyone is acting for himself alone.” Solitude for García Márquez becomes “a political concept” in his effort “to give solitude the political connotation I believe it should have.”³⁴ Both solitude and nostalgia, he reveals, lead to isolation, narcissism, and lack of empathy for others. His work praises compassion over pettiness in the face of a chaotic and absurd universe.

He recognizes as the highest value the capacity for love, which alone allows survival in the face of the absurd. It is a tragic moment when in One Hundred Years of Solitude he indicts Colonel Buendia for his inability to love. García Márquez even told Claudia Dreifus in an interview for Playboy magazine that in his work he is “a nympho-maniac of the art” of love.³⁵ In his work he conveys the joy of sexual connection.

People who love nature and animals, like the Colonel who grows to value his rooster in El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; translated in No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, 1968), are anointed with the author’s approval. Like Florentino Ariza in Love in The Time Of Cholera, they can find solace even in the scent of bitter almonds, or in the flavor of the guava. They are capable of solidarity with other human beings. His approach has not been consciously psychoanalytic, how-ever, but intuitive. Referring to a convention of psychoanalysts that met in Buenos Aires to discuss One Hundred Years of Solitude, he remarked “What interested me was that the aunt should go to bed with her nephew, not the psychoanalytic origins of this event.”³⁶

AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

He won prizes from the beginning, from that first scholarship, which took him from home. In 1955 he won a prize from the Bogota Association of Writers and Artists for “Un dia despues del sabado” (“One Day After Saturday”), one of the stories that would be published in the collection, Los funerales de la Mama Grande (Big Mama’s Funeral, 1961; translated in No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, 1968). In 1961 he won the Premio Literario Esso award in Colombia for La mala hora (1961; translated as In Evil Hour, 1979), when the novel was still only in manuscript form.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was showered with prizes, most notably the Chianciano Award in Italy and the Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger (Prize for Best Foreign Book) from the Academie Francaise in 1969. Three years later García Márquez was awarded both the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Venezuelan Romulo Gallegos Prize for One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In 1971 he received a doctorate of letters from Columbia University. He has since expressed his amazement that in awarding the doctorate they “should decide to choose me out of twelve men from the whole world,” especially since his “path has always been anti-academic.” Then he added, “it’s as if they gave the Nobel Prize to a bull-fighter.”³⁷

García Márquez accepted the title of doctor honoris causa, but refused to wear a tie to the ceremony his moment of rebellion, all the while believing that, properly, “such things happened to one after death.” He also said, “The type of recognition I have always desired and appreciated is that of people who read me and talk to me about my books, not with admiration or enthusiasm but with affection.”³⁸

There were many Latin Americans at the ceremony. They called out, “Up with Latin America!” At that moment, García Márquez has said, “for the first time, I felt moved and was glad I had accepted.”³⁹

He has also accepted the French Legion of Honor medal from Francois Mitterand, whose inauguration he attended in 1981. That same year he received the Serfin Prize.

The most prestigious of his awards was, of course, the Nobel Prize. When he left Colombia for Sweden, he went accompanied by an entourage that included six Colombian dance and music groups. Belisario Betancur, the newly elected president of Colombia, declared that “all of Colombia would be with Gabo.” He was a national trea-sure. Despite all of the acclaim, while in Sweden he remained himself, a costeno, wearing not white tie and tails but a white linen “liqui-liqui” suit, the traditional collarless suit of the Carribean coast.

Gabriel García Márquez has often used the prizes he has won to support causes in which he believes. When he received the Romulo Gallegos prize in 1972, he donated the money to the Venezuelan political reform party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement toward Socialism). The $10,000 he received with his Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize for Literature went to the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners.

In the United States he has been elected an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

NOTES

1. Gene H Bell-Villada, García Márquez The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill & London University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p 12

2. Claudia Dreifus, “Playboy Interview Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” Playboy, 30 (February 1983) 66

3. Michael Wood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cambridge & New York Cambridge University Press, 1990), p 110

4. Marlise Simons, “A Talk With Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” New York Times Book Review, 5 December 1982

5. Dreifus, “Playboy Interview” 67

6. Alan Riding, “Revolution and the Intellectual in Latin America,” New York Times, Sunday, 13 March 1983

7. Rita Guibert, “Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” Seven Voices Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert (New York Knopf, 1973), p 335

8. Simons, “A Talk “

9. Guibert, Seven Voices, p 335

10. Ibid, p 322

11. Riding, “Revolution and the Intellectual “

12. Guibert, Seven Voices, p 330

13. Peter Stone, “Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” in Writers at Work The Pans Review Interviews Sixth Series, edited by George Plimpton (New York Viking, 1984), p 339

14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Magic and Reality, written, directed, and produced by Ana Cristina Navarro, 60 minutes, Films For the Humanities & Sciences, 1981, video

15. Dreifus,“Playboy Interview” 77

16. Simons, “A Talk”

17. Ibid

18. Guibert, Seven Voices, p 323

19. Quoted in Mario Vargas Llosa, “From Aracataca to Macondo,” in Modern Critical Views Gabriel Garcia Marquez, edited by Harold Bloom (New York Chelsea House, 1989), p 7

20. Simons, “A Talk “

21. Dreifus, “Playboy Interview” 77

22. Quoted in Vargas Llosa, Historia De Un Deicidio (Barcelona Barral Editores, 1971), p 28

23. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Magic and Reality

24. “My Thanks,” coda to The General in His Labynnth, translated by Edith Grossman (New York Knopf, 1990), p 271

25. Stone, Paris Review, p 320

26. Stone, Paris Review, p 320

27. Ibid

28. Guibert, Seven Voices, p 327

29. Ibid

30. German Vargas, “Autor de una.obra que hara ruido,” in Encuentro liberal (Bogota), 29 April 1967, p 22

31. Bell-Villada, The Man and His Work, p 52

32. Dreifus, “Playboy Interview” 176

33. The preceding account of Garcia Marquez and his friend Father Camilo Torres Restrepo is taken from an interview by the author with Garcia Marquez in Mexico City in 1986

34. Guibert, Seven Voices, p 314

35. Dreifus, “Playboy Interview”

36. Guibert, Seven Voices, p 315

37. Ibid, p 336

38. Ibid

39. Ibid, p 337