Gabriel García Márquez: Clandestine in Chile

Jo Littler reviews Gabriel García Márquez' Clandestine in Chile.

Márquez has had parallel careers as journalist and screenwriter alongside his more prominent role as Nobel prizewinning novelist. This book brings these strands together as Márquez tells us about the exiled film director Miguel Littín's experience of returning to Chile in 1985, under a false identity, to record life under Pinochet's dictatorship. Littín had only narrowly escaped with his life 12 years earlier, when the socialist president Salvador Allende was brutally ousted by a US-backed military coup and many of his supporters were rounded up and murdered.

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Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Ilan Stavans: Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years
Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez: Memories of my Melancholy Whores

Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Maybe Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the most ‘realistic’ work by Gabriel García Márquez, after all it’s based on a historical event that happened in hist the hometown.

When the novel begins, we know that the Vicario brothers are going to kill Santiago Nasar - in fact had already killed him, to avenge the outraged honor of their sister Angela, but the story ends precisely at the time of Santiago Nasar’s death.

Cyclical time, as used by García Márquez in his works, reappears here thoroughly decomposed in each moment, neatly and accurately reconstructed by the narrator, who starts by telling what happened long ago, then moves back and forth in his story and returns a long after the events to tell the fate of the survivors.

The action is at once collective and personal, clear and ambiguous, and grips you from the start, even knowing the outcome of the plot.

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Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)

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Ilan Stavans - Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years

Kevin O’Kelly reviews Ilan Stavans' Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years.

In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez was an obscure writer drowning in debt, a law school dropout living hand-to-mouth as a journalist and screenwriter. His early novels had garnered solid reviews but little money. Two years later he was the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,’’ a novel that achieved immediate commercial and critical success in the Spanish-speaking world. When “Solitude’’ appeared in English in 1970, critics in the United States invoked the author’s name in the same breath as Faulkner and Günter Grass.

The transformation of a young man from Colombia’s coastal provinces into one of the greatest writers of our time is the subject of “Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years.’’ Ilan Stavans, a prominent scholar of Latin American culture at Amherst College, is an able guide to the world that shaped García Márquez, from the small towns where he spent his early years (he was born in 1928) to the often violent politics that played a pivotal role in his family’s history and radicalized his political consciousness. Stavans also recounts the family stories that provided the novelist with much of the raw material for his fiction, such as his grandparents’ disapproval of his father as a suitor and his parents’ subsequent secret courtship that was recast in “Love in the Time of Cholera.’’

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Latin American Literature

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

T. C. Boyle elects Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude as his book of a lifetime.

It may come as a great shock to my readers to discover that I wasn't always the elegantly dressed, highly attuned citizen of the world they have come to know. Far from it. In fact, for some time I was a quite clearly deranged wild-haired youth dressed in motley and living in hippie squalor in the gatehouse to a castle on the Hudson, in company with three dogs and three glowing specimens of my own species.

I was experiencing nature. And reading. (As well as other things it would be impolite to mention in a family newspaper.) In that period I came across the magical realists of Latin America: Borges, Cortazar, Asturias, Garcia Marquez.

I can still recall the excitement of stretching out my long undernourished frame on a very doggy sofa in front of the fire and coming upon the exquisite opening sentence (which I am quoting from the very copy I then held, which is, as you can imagine, much the worse for wear): "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."

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Memories of my Melancholy Whores

Angelique P. Manalad reviews Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Memories of my Melancholy Whores.

A concept that would make everyone react in disgust: a 90-year-old retiring journalist who finds himself in the eve of his birthday wanting to feel his youth through a night of passion with a 14-year-old virgin drugged into service by a whorehouse.

Delivered by the Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s in his trademark magic realism and translated in English by Edith Grossman, Memories of my Melancholy Whores challenges readers to sympathize with the narrator. It is a tribute to his lyricism and humanity that Marquez succeeds.

In a twist of fate, the narrator falls into a pattern of sleeping with the young girl in the literal sense of the word, finding love instead of lust in each night that he slumbers beside the child.

He recounts of his previous escapades with women as well as the horror of finding himself in love for the very first time at eve of his life. The narrator illustrates his inner conflict. Describing his passion for the child in letters written in his weekly column, readers are able to empathize with the joys and disappointments of finding love in the wrong stage of one’s life.

Said to be a close comparison to Vladimir Nabokonov’s Lolita, Garcia weaves his own words with a different pattern of exulting other obsessions more powerful than lust itself. Delgadina, the name given by the narrator to the child, was more of a symbol of hope, love and failure all rolled into one, rather than a whore as presented by the book. A young girl robbed off her adolescence was beautifully and intricately described in Marquez’s flow of words.

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Colombian Literature

The director of the latest Spanish adaptation of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, «Love and other Demons,» is hoping for a better reception than the critical panning of the English-language «Love in the Time of Cholera.
«I thought that «Love in the Time of Cholera» was a good film, even though the criticism of it was very tough,» said Costa Rican director, Hilda Hidalgo.

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Latin American Literature

A new edition of A Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, was presented here last December 26th as a tribute to the 80 years of an indispensable writer in the history of Spanish speaking literature.

Illustrated by the painter Roberto Fabelo and published by the editorial house Arte y Literatura, the Instituto Cubano del Libro (Cuban Book Institute) also celebrates with this volume the 40th anniversary of a book that marked a new way for narration and opened the boom of Latin American literature, during the 1960’s.







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Latin American Literature

Love in the Time of Cholera - Trailer

New Line Cinema is bringing Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez' best-selling novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the big screen with Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") writing the screenplay, and Mike Newell ("Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", "Four Weddings and a Funeral") directing. The cast includes Javier Bardem, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Benjamin Bratt, John Leguizamo, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Hector Elizondo and Liev Schreiber.






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Latin American Literature

If you love love, this book is the best love story ever.

Oprah Winfrey has picked "Love in the Time of Cholera," the epic love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as her next book club selection.





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Latin American Literature

Tomás Eloy Martínez tells the story of the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Agosto de 1967 fue el mes que cambió la vida de Gabriel García Márquez. Había cumplido 40 años el 6 de marzo de ese año, y en septiembre anterior había puesto punto final a Cien años de soledad, su novela de gloria. Todavía no tenía editor. Lo más probable era que terminara cediéndola a Era, el sello mexicano independiente que acababa de publicar El coronel no tiene quien le escriba.

En mayo, cuando la revista Mundo Nuevo adelantó en París el fragmento sobre el insomnio en Macondo, una ráfaga de deslumbramiento corrió entre los lectores hispanoamericanos. Se estaba ante la completa novedad de un lenguaje sin antecedente y de una osadía narrativa que sólo podía compararse con Rabelais, con Kafka y con los cronistas de Indias. Aun así, el autor seguía siendo casi un desconocido. En su casa de San Angel Inn, al sur de la infinita ciudad de México, seguía enredado en apuros económicos que le impedían pagar a tiempo el alquiler y obligaban a su mujer, Mercedes Barcha, a pedir que les fiaran sin término los alimentos en el mercado. Llevaban ya seis meses de insolvencia cuando el propietario de la casa llamó a la puerta y les preguntó si tenían idea de cuándo podrían saldar la deuda. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Colombian writers Gabriel García Márquez and Santiago Gamboa will be homaged today in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo within the "Feira do Livro do Colégio Miguel de Cervantes" (Miguel de Cervantes School Book Fair).


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Colombian Literature

Although a bit off-topic here's a review of Milan Kundera's The Curtain where he tells of an encounter with Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar in Prague.

During a conversation with a French acquaintance he is eager not to let his account of life in Prague under Soviet surveillance dip into the syrupy sweet “aesthetic evil” of kitsch. As the dominant style in the 19th century, kitsch was understood by Central Europeans as the tyranny of over-blown Romanticism. Kundera describes an episode that could be found in one of his novels: an apartment swap with a womanizing friend that befuddles the Soviet spies as well as the friend’s multiple lovers. The ensuing icy response to the light treatment of a heavy subject is chalked up to the Frenchman’s own distaste for the vulgar, his nation’s equivalent of kitsch. The two men are held apart not by their respective native languages, but by a cultural barrier that is deeply engrained within their national literary consciousness. As an antidote to this story of national differences Kundera describes a memorable encounter with Latin American writers, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar, when the trio visited Prague in the early days of the Russian occupation. “We would talk and a bridge—silvery, light, quivering, shimmering—formed like a rainbow over the century between my little Central Europe and the immense Latin America; a bridge that linked Matyas Braun’s ecstatic statues in Prague to the mad churches of Mexico.” For Kundera, the experience of reading One Hundred Years of Solitude moves from a free-flowing appraisal of magical realism, into an analysis of historical and social continuities between two countries traumatized by centuries of invasion.

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Latin American Literature

The 62,000 books commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude on sale since March 26 in Colombia sold out. Due to the demand a reprint of more 70,000 is predicted.

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Latin American Literature

Gabriel García Márquez at the International Congress of Spanish Language.

"To think that a million people would read something written in the solitude of my room with 28 letters of the alphabet and two fingers as my sole arsenal seems insane"

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Colombian Literature

Two giants of literature, one black eye and 30 years of silence

It is possibly the most famous literary feud of modern times: Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel prize-winning author, and Mario Vargas Llosa, his fellow giant of Latin American literature, have refused to talk to each other for three decades.

Once great friends, the two writers have steadfastly refused to talk about the reasons behind their spectacular bust-up, and so have their wives.

Now two pictures have appeared in which a youthful García Márquez shows off a black eye, and the photographer who took them has shed light on the origins of the feud. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it involves a woman.

Rodrigo Moya, a close friend of García Marquez, took the black-and-white pictures in 1976 but has kept them secret until this week. He decided to publish them to coincide with García Marquez’s 80th birthday and has broken his silence in a tongue-in-cheek account of the night in which GarcÍa Marquez and Vargas Llosa brawled, entitled “The Horrific Story of the Black Eye”.

The photographs, which first appeared in La Jornadain Mexico show a shiner under GarcÍa Márquez’s left eye and a cut on his nose. In one, the Colombian novelist is looking deadly serious. In the other, he grins broadly from under his moustache, as if acknowledging that the picture would one day become a classic.

According to Mr Moya, various Latin American artists and intellectuals had gathered in Mexico City for a film premiére in 1976. After the film, García Márquez went to embrace his close friend, Vargas Llosa. “Mario!” he managed to say, before receiving a “tremendous blow” to the face from the Peruvian author.

“How dare you come and greet me after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona!” Vargas Llosa reportedly shouted, referring to his wife.

Amid the screams of some women, García Marquez sat on the floor with a profusely bleeding nose, as the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska ran to get a steak for his eye. Two days later, Mr Moya took the photos of his friend’s black eye.

The long feud between the two literary heavyweights has also been one of the most colourful. The two men had been close friends – so much so that Mr García Márquez is godfather to Mr Vargas Llosa’s second son, Gabriel.

After the cinema fight, however, the two stopped speaking and embarked on radically different paths. García Marquez stuck to his Leftist leanings, developing a close friendship with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Vargas Llosa became an ardent admirer of Margaret Thatcher and ran for President of Peru on a Right-wing platform. He has been one of President Castro’s most outspoken critics.

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Latin American Literature

Casa de América in Madrid pays tribute to Colombian author, Gabriel García Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature 25 years ago and who celebrates his 80th birthday tomorrow.

The homage, which started at 9am this morning and is expected to last for around sixteen hours, consists of a public reading of his best-known novel 'A hundred years of solitude' (1967), at the Palacio de Linares that is the headquarters of the Casa de América in Madrid.

Each reader will complete a fifteen minute stint, during which they are expected to get through around seven pages.

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Latin American Literature

Bordertown directed by Gregory Nava

Nava says his inspiration for "Bordertown" draws from the work of Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the social dramas of Charles Dickens. It is also a return to the tradition of Nava's breakthrough movie, "El Norte," which was nominated in 1984 for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In that film, most memorable for the scene of illegal immigrants crawling through a rat-infested sewer, he created a fictional story from scores of interviews. In "Bordertown" he took the same approach, trying to weave together the stories told by family members of the murdered young women into his "thriller-drama."

But while "Bordertown" will open in German theaters later this month, and other European theaters soon thereafter, it still does not have a US release date -- despite what Nava describes as widespread interest in the Latino community. It seems a long wait for a film whose mission, says Nava, is to take a "social injustice and compel people to do something about it." Especially so, since in Juarez the deaths continue and the murders remain solved.

Nava describes, in almost crusading terms, an "eight-year journey" to get the film made. "Hollywood is just not interested in movies about social drama and social situations," he says. "They are more interested in making movies about super heroes -- escapist entertainment. And so we had to do this independently and it's going to be distributed independently."

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Making of Love in the Time of Cholera

He made Hugh Grant a floppy-haired trans-Atlantic star and teenage Harry Potter a screen hero. Now British director Mike Newell faces the greatest challenge of his career: bringing a masterwork of 20th-century Latin American fiction to Hollywood from a land better known for drugs and guerrillas.

Newell just wrapped filming for Love in the Time of Cholera, the first English-language screen adaptation of a work by Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

From the two-year struggle to acquire film rights from the notoriously protective author to the commercially risky casting of foreign lead actors to crises in filming on location, the making of the movie has been anything but easy.

Then again, neither were the 51 years, nine months, and four days that lead character Florentino Ariza famously waited in the novel for his true love. In the end, it was worth it for Ariza, and Newell and Hollywood producer Scott Steindorff are betting their travails will pay off in the authenticity of the adaptation – and at the box office.

For the last three months, Newell, Steindorff, and a polyglot cast and crew have taken over the steamy Caribbean port of Cartagena, a little-known colonial gem of leafy, hidden patios and turreted city walls where a great part of the novel is set.

They transformed cobbled squares into painstaking re-creations of the 1880s and the 1930s. They turned a commercial tugboat into a replica of a 19th-century paddle steamer. They designed makeup to span five decades and withstand 32 C heat and humidity.

There were times – when the city flooded from torrential rainstorms or less-hardy crew members dropped out – when it looked as if it wasn't going to come together.

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Latin American Literature

Love in the Time of Cholera on Location

British director Mike Newell faces the greatest challenge of his career: bringing a masterwork of 20th-century Latin American fiction to Hollywood from a land better known for drugs and guerrillas. Newell just wrapped filming for "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first English-language screen adaptation of a work by Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez. From the two-year struggle to acquire film rights from the notoriously protective author to the commercially risky casting of foreign lead actors to crises in filming on location, the making of the movie has been anything but easy.
Then again, neither were the 51 years, nine months, and four days that lead character Florentino Ariza famously waited in the novel for his true love. In the end, it was worth it for Ariza, and Newell and Hollywood producer Scott Steindorff are betting their travails will pay off in the authenticity of the adaptation -- and at the box office.
For the last three months, Newell, Steindorff, and a polyglot cast and crew have taken over the steamy Caribbean port of Cartagena, a little-known colonial gem of leafy, hidden patios and turreted city walls where a great part of the novel is set. They transformed cobbled squares into painstaking re - creations of the 1880s and the 1930s. They turned a commercial tugboat into a replica of a 19th - century paddle steamer. They designed makeup to span five decades and withstand 90-degree heat and humidity.

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Latin American Cinema

Mike Newell has begun filming Love in the Time of Cholera

British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has begun filming Love in the Time of Cholera, based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 1985 novel, in Cartagena.

Newell, also known for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Donnie Brasco, filmed scenes this weekend in the walled colonial Caribbean city's Factoria street, according to members of the crew.

The film's cast includes Spaniard Javier Bardem and Italian Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as well as Colombian actress Catalina Sandino, nominated in 2005 for an Oscar as best actress in a leading role for her performance in Maria, Full of Grace.

You can find the review here