BELLA CIAO GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended
the world of letters. He became a hero to the Latin American left as an
early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of
Washington’s interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable visage,
set off by a white mustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly
recognizable. Unable to receive a US visa for years due to his politics,
he was nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill
Clinton and Francois Mitterrand among his presidential friends.
(Photo: AFP)
(Photo: AFP)
(Photo: AP)
(Photo: EPA)
Marquez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2002 (Photo: Reuters)
Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the
world of letters. He became a hero to the Latin American left as an
early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of
Washington’s interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable visage,
set off by a white mustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly
recognizable. Unable to receive a US visa for years due to his politics,
he was nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill
Clinton and Francois Mitterrand among his presidential friends.
Marquez and former US President Bill Clinton (Photo: AFP)
YET
“The world
has lost one of its greatest visionary writers – and one of my favorites
from the time I was young,” President Barack Obama said.
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Image ‘Copyleft’ by Carlos Latuff
An unexpected eulogy from the President of Israel …
*Peres eulogizes Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez
President says author, who died at the age of 87, ‘expressed great interest’ in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
*
President Shimon Peres eulogized Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez who passed away on Thursday afternoon at the age of 87.
“The world will
feel the loss of a great dreamer, who told both children and us adults,
in such a beautiful manner, about life’s truths,” Peres wrote.
In his statement, the president told of his meeting with the acclaimed author in Marquez’s home country of Colombia.(Photo: AFP)
Marquez, Peres said, “expressed great interest” in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
The literary
giant wished for Middle East peace, Peres said, and said that until
peace is achieved “my heart will remain broken and I will pray every day
for the realization of the dream of peace.”
One of the most
revered and influential writers of his generation, Marquez brought Latin
America’s charm and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of
millions and became the best-known practitioner of “magical realism,” a
blending of fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made
the extraordinary seem almost routine.
Known to millions simply as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was widely seen as
the Spanish language’s most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in
the 17th century. His extraordinary literary celebrity spawned
comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.(Photo: AFP)
His flamboyant
and melancholy works – among them “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,”
`’Love in the Time of Cholera” and “The Autumn of the Patriarch” –
outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967
novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold more than 50 million copies
in more than 25 languages.
The first
sentence of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has become one of the most
famous opening lines of all time: “Many years later, as he faced the
firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant
afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
(Photo: AP)
With writers
including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early
practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New
Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism,
with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the “Story
of A Shipwrecked Sailor,” the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for
10 days. He was also a scion of the region’s left.
Shorter pieces dealt with subjects including Venezuela’s
larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, while the book “News of a
Kidnapping” vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo
Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia,
kidnapping members of its elite. In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the
Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and
competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative
journalism across Latin America.(Photo: EPA)
But for so many inside and outside the region, it was his novels that became synonymous with Latin America itself.
“The world has
lost one of its greatest visionary writers – and one of my favorites
from the time I was young,” President Barack Obama said.
When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described
the region as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and
beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher
more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets,
warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we
have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has
been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”Marquez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2002 (Photo: Reuters)
Marquez and former US President Bill Clinton (Photo: AFP)
“From the time I
read `One Hundred Years of Solitude’ more than 40 years ago, I was
always amazed by his unique gifts of imagination, clarity of thought,
and emotional honesty,” Clinton said Thursday. “I was honored to be his
friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20
years.”
Garcia Marquez
was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast
on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga
Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering
homeopathic pharmacist who fathered at least four children outside of
his marriage.
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BELLA CIAO GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ | Beat the rich said,
Ponce said,
Thanks to him many lies now lives in the dark.
V
BELLA CIAO GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ « Document The Truth said,