14 DAY TRIAL // Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer best known for his Nobel prize-winning novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” died yesterday, April 17, in Mexico City, Mexico, aged 87. The news was confirmed by his former editor with Random House Publishing, Cristobal Pera.
According to Pera, the award-winning author had learned back in 1999 that he was suffering from lymphatic cancer and later, in 2012, the writer's brother disclosed to the public that Marquez had also developed senile dementia.
Marquez, who was affectionately known throughout Latin America as “Gabo” was not only a novelist but also a journalist, a screenwriter, playwright, memoirist and student of political history. He was an important cultural figure not only in his native Colombia, but throughout the entire Latin America and his voice commanded a vast public following.
His death has hit the literary world hard, despite the fact that there have been several reports about his failing health in the last couple of months. Not only Colombians have come forward to express regret at his passing, but also important people from the United States.
American president Barack Obama is quoted by the Washington Post as saying that “The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers — and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” going on to call him a “representative and voice for the people of the Americas.”
Garcia's fame came with the publishing of his most famous novel, “One hundred Years of Solitude,” the epic tale of several generations of the Buendia family in the fictional town of Macondo which manages to capture perfectly the day-to-day life in South America at the time.
In 1982, the Nobel committee awarded Marquez the Nobel prize for literature and said that the author has created “a cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history, time and again, burst the bounds of chaos.”
Other important works of the Colombian writer include “Autumn of the Patriarch” and “Love in the Time of the Cholera,” which is based on the love story between his grandparents. With these works, Marquez established himself as the creator of a literary style that has been called magic realism, which aims to blend magical elements and events with mundane and realistic situations.
His novels went on to become famous all over the world, being translated into many languages and Marquez finally ended up in a select category of writers that today is viewed as obligatory reading.