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Santiago Nasar is Cayetano Gentile Chimento

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On the day they were going to kill him, Cayetano Gentile Chimento got up oblivious to his impending murder. Within hours the dashing Colombian medical student was dead, repeatedly stabbed for allegedly deflowering another man's bride.

Few would today remember the 1951 murder, but for the intervention of one of Latin America's best-loved authors. The killing served as the inspiration for Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold - a 1981 classic that cemented the author's reputation as a literary master.

But Márquez's blend of fact and fiction also led to accusations that he had unlawfully misappropriated the life-story of another man and prompted a lawsuit by Miguel Reyes Palencia, who claimed that Márquez had based the novel's main character, Bayardo San Román, on his life.

This week those accusations were finally dismissed as a supreme court in the Colombian city of Barranquilla ruled that Palencia had no right to compensation. The case against Márquez was first brought in 1994, when Palencia claimed that the 1982 Nobel literature laureate had unlawfully used his life story as the basis for Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Palencia demanded 50% of the book's royalties as well as a co-author credit.

Márquez's book tells the story of Bayardo San Román, a wealthy Colombian who Palencia said was modelled on him.

In the novel San Román weds Angela Vicario, a beautiful local girl, only to send her back to her family in disgrace after discovering that she is not a virgin.

Vicario's family, livid at their daughter's rejection, force her to name the man who took her virginity. She accuses Santiago Nasar.

Nasar, who is based on Chimento, is subsequently killed by her drunken brothers, who repeatedly stab him with butchers' knives.

While Márquez has long admitted his book was inspired by Palencia's family history and the murder of Chimento, the author argued that the names and the rest of the book's plot were the fruits of his own imagination.

In its ruling on Tuesday, the court agreed. "Hundreds of literary, artistic, and cinematographic works have had as their central story facts from real life, which have been adapted to the creator's perspective, without this being an impediment to [the author's right] to claim economic rights over them."

The court also dismissed Palencia's demand to be credited as a co-author. "Mr Miguel Reyes Palencia could never have told the story as the writer Gabriel García Márquez did, and could never have employed the literary language that was actually used. The work is characterised by its originality."

Speaking to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, Márquez's lawyer, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, celebrated the verdict.

"This ruling is important, because it helps enhance the central thesis, which is valid for literature and art in general, that what matters is the way it presents an object of reality, not reality itself. It's like a woman who poses for a painter [but] then demands half the copyright. She owns her body but the work itself belongs to the painter," he said.
Topics

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Nobel author Gabriel García Márquez wins 17-year legal fight over murder classic

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On the day they were going to kill him, Cayetano Gentile Chimento got up oblivious to his impending murder. Within hours the dashing Colombian medical student was dead, repeatedly stabbed for allegedly deflowering another man's bride. Few would today remember the 1951 murder, but for the intervention of one of Latin America's best-loved authors.

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1986- 1990 (Rise of the Drug Cartels)

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1982- 1986 (Economic Cooperation Agreement btw Community and the Andean Pact Countries)

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1978-1982 (Revolutionary Groups Cause Havoc)

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Dreams

Foreshadow death of Santiago

Weather

Rain symbolizes death of Santiago

Religion

ultimate demise

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Magic Realism

Illusions

Symbolism

Poetic/ figurative lang.

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1950s

town in Colombia by Caribbean Sea

Monday Morning after Angela's wedding

modeled after Aracataca, Colombia (writer’s home)

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Where twins went to jail/ later retired until death.

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- peaceful immigrants

- Settled at the beginning of the 1900s in Caribbean towns

- Vital

-Sold colored cloth

-bazaar trinkets

-Clannish

-Hardworking

-Catholic

-Loved Playing Card

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Is the narrator also lying?

"Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions."

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Free Audio Books for Intellectual Exercise

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Partially Examined Life podcast - Nietzsche - On Truth & Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

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On Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873). What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche's career but unpublished during his lifetime, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the "truths" we tell each other are just agreements by social convention.

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Machismo vs. Virginal Innocence (Cult of Death)

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Colombia is Magical Realism - Coffee Cultural Landscape - 30"

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You can dive into the sea and climbing snowcapped peaks ; Also, follow the rafting rivers flow , flying over the coffee plantations ; walking, and cycling through valleys and mountains ; and much more ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More information on Colombia http://www.colombia.travel/ Follow us on our social networks !

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García Márquez, Magical Realism Master, Dies at 87 | The New York Times

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Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose "One Hundred Years of Solitude" established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. Produced by: Sofia Perpetua Read the story here: http://nyti.ms/1pg7XAg Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n Watch more videos at: http://nytimes.com/video --------------------------------------------------------------- Want more from The New York Times?

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Town by Magdalena River.

Garcia Marquez traveled here as child.

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you won't find any talking trees or heroic, sombrero-wearing peasants in Alberto Fuguet's fiction. This 33-year-old Chilean author of two novels and a collection of short stories is part of a rising tide of young Latin American writers who have turned against the collective voice of magic realism in favor of personal, realistic, apolitical fiction. When his first novel, "Bad Vibes," was published in Chile in 1991, it caused a minor sensation, selling 35,000 copies and triggering a secondary sales boom for the previously banned "Catcher in the Rye." Just out in the U.S. from St. Martin's, "Bad Vibes" centers on Matias, a 17 year-old with a very American jones for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Matias reads Rolling Stone, loves Holden Caulfield and even though he runs with the cool clique of outsiders within the privileged world of upper-class Santiago youth, he is the embodiment of alienation. "Bad Vibes" is a visceral, energetic read that shatters preconceptions and destroys stereotypes. Like Irvine Welsh kicking down doors for his brash Scottish contemporaries, Alberto Fuguet is leading the charge of Gabriel Garcma Marquez's disgruntled children. Listen up or history will blow by you.

when I was just starting out as a writer at home in Santiago, Chile, in the late 1980s, the nation's premier writer, Jose Donoso, who died late last year, invited me to participate in a workshop to be held at his house, and he eventually became something of a mentor to me. I usually took whatever advice he had to offer. Donoso had taught creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City during the 1960s and always talked about it with great nostalgia and respect. He encouraged me to apply to the International Writers Program there, and after a couple of letters and some string-pulling, I got in, arriving at Iowa from Chile in the summer of 1994 with high hopes.

I had a secret agenda that wasn't really a secret at all: I wanted to take advantage of my being in the heart of the heart of the literary land. And I also wanted get published in the States, the home of so many writers and artists who had inspired me. To be published in English, in a sense, was like joining that group. Iowa City, to me, was the promised land. I felt like a true literary pilgrim, and it seemed altogether appropriate that my dorm was called the Mayflower. I felt I had arrived at last, but I soon found that I still had a long way to go. Unlike most of the other participants, I wasn't out to write a book or get my first novel published. I already had three under my belt. The problem was: They were in Spanish.

My first afternoon at Iowa proved to be a sign of things to come. I was invited, along with the other foreign writers, to a welcome reception. There were people from Nigeria, India, Syria, Malaysia, Burma, Poland and Israel. One of the program coordinators casually suggested it would be great to see everyone in their "native outfits." So, following his suggestion, I went down in an MTV Latino T-shirt (sent to me by a VJ friend), baggy shorts and a pair of Birkenstocks. The coordinators were disappointed, to say the least.

After a few weeks, I began to suspect that I might actually have a chance at getting published in English, even if I didn't have the right outfit. After all, I was Latino, and everything Latino was "hot." Bookstore shelves were peppered with Latino names and colorful dust jackets: Santiago, Alvarez, Cisneros, Anaya, Esquivel, Castillo, Allende, Rodríguez, Viramontes. There seemed to be a Spanish-language wave that I wanted to ride on my South American board. I couldn't believe my luck. I figured that all I had to do was get someone to translate something I wrote, and then my work would speak for itself.

A student translator eagerly invited me to her house one day. She served me some nachos with salsa and put on a Silvio Rodríguez tape (Rodríguez is a pro-Castro Cuban troubadour) in an effort to make me feel "at home." She began our work session with her opinion: She really enjoyed my work, but somehow, she felt, it lacked "magical realism." We worked on it, but the flying abuelitas and the obsessively constructed genealogies didn't seem to fit in my work. Weeks later, the Iowa Review rejected the first story I submitted to them. In a polite letter, I was gently told that it wasn't what they were looking for. In fact, the story I had written could easily have taken place right here, in America, they said.

I got the message. I knew I had done something wrong, and I had the sinking feeling that my North American glory days had come to an end before they had even gotten started. Add some folklore and a dash of tropical heat and come back later. That was the message I heard. So I went back to the bookstores and took a closer look at all those novels with Hispanic authors. Sure enough, they fit the formula. They had done their homework. Each book offered either color-by-numbers magical realism or the cult of the underdeveloped. Sagas of sweaty migrant farm laborers, the plight of misunderstood political refugees or the spicy violence of the barrio. All decent themes, of course, but quite removed from my middle-class, metropolitan Chilean existence. All of a sudden, it hit me: I was Latin American, all right -- I just wasn't Latino enough. My American dreams came to an abrupt end.

Fast forward: Things happened, and a combination of luck, good timing and the right people came into my life. My first book, "Mala Onda," was finally accepted for publication in the United States by a large New York publishing house. Luckily, I found an editor who felt as I did: He was fed up with García Márquez wannabes and is a true believer in cultural realism, a sort of NAFTA-like writing that he felt I exemplified. Great. However, I realize now more than ever that I still somehow don't feel part of the Latino canon. And I wonder if I ever will. But what can I do? My language is Spanish and my home is in South America. How much more Latino can you get?

The thing is, I get suffocated by thick, sweet, humid air that smells like mangos, and I get the munchies when I begin to fly among thousands of colorful butterflies. I can't help it; I'm an urban dweller through and through. The closest I'll ever get to "Like Water for Chocolate" is cruising the titles at my local Blockbuster.

Reinaldo Arenas, the well-known writer and Cuban exile, hit the nail on the head when he attacked the South American literary stereotypes that so-called "developed" countries have fostered. "To write in Latin America is a drama (whether conscious or not), played out beneath the eternal double curse of underdevelopment and exoticism." Arenas feels that Latin American magic realism has degenerated to the point that its dominant theme is nothing more than a desire to pander to the magic-starved sensibilities of North American and European readers. I tend to agree with him.

"The other side of the curse is that of conformity. We [Latinos] ... are [considered] noble savages, simple, passionate beings whose only goal in life is to cultivate an acre of land, and dance the cumbia ... By taking the path of exoticism, and with the paternalistic support and understanding proffered by the Europeans and North Americans, one can easily reach fame and fortune, and, sometimes even the Nobel Prize."

Exactly. Unlike the ethereal world of García Márquez's imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call "McOndo" -- a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicized, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences. Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en español), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeño-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape. Julian Barnes echoes this feeling in his novel "Flaubert's Parrot," where his scholarly narrator declares that the entire genre of magical realism should be banished: "A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America," he says. The example he gives speaks for itself. "Ah, the fredonna tree whose roots grow at the tip of its branches, and whose fibers assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner ..."

Writers today who mold themselves after the Latin American "boom" writers of the 1960s (García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a few) have transformed fiction writing into the fairy-tale business, cranking out shamelessly folkloric novels that cater to the imaginations of politically correct readers -- readers who, at present, aren't even aware of Latino cultural realism. David Gallagher, writing from Chile for the London Times Literary Supplement, considers this obscurity an asset: "These writers don't have an international reputation to protect. Nor do they feel the necessity of submerging themselves in the waters of the politically correct. Since they don't have the advantage of living abroad, they wouldn't even know how to write a PC novel ... they aren't writing for an international audience, and therefore, have no need to maintain the status quo of the stereotypical Latin America that is packaged up for export."

I feel the great literary theme of Latin American identity (who are we?) must now take a back seat to the theme of personal identity (who am I?). The McOndo writers -- such as Rodrigo Fresán and Martin Rejtman of Argentina, Jaime Bayly of Peru, Sergio Gómez of Chile, Edmundo Paz Soldán of Bolivia and Naief Yeyha of Mexico, to name a few -- base their stories on individual lives, instead of collective epics. This new genre may be one of the byproducts of a free-market economy and the privatization craze that has swept South America.

I don't deny that there exists a colorful, exotic aspect to Latin America, but in my opinion, life on this continent is far too complex to be so simply categorized. It is an injustice to reduce the essence of Latin America to men in ponchos and sombreros, gun-toting drug lords and sensual salsa-swinging señoritas. As a character from my second book said: "I want to write a saga, but without falling into the trap of magical realism. Pure virtual realism, pure McOndo literature. Kind of like 'The House of the Spirits,' only without the spirits."

In the past, Latin American writers felt compelled to leave their home countries to be able to write about them. Not only were they seeking political freedom, but cultural nutrition. As expatriates, they idealized their countries to the point that they created a world that never really existed. I feel very comfortable at my desk in Santiago, writing about the world around me. A world that comes to me through television, radio, the Internet and movies, which I send back through my fiction. My Latin American fiction.

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you won't find any talking trees or heroic, sombrero-wearing peasants in Alberto Fuguet's fiction. This 33-year-old Chilean author of two novels and a collection of short stories is part of a rising tide of young Latin American writers who have turned against the collective voice of magic realism in favor of personal, realistic, apolitical fiction.

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intro by Rob Spillman

essay written at 33 yrs. old

Magical Realism

Instead: Fiction =

personal

realistic

apolitical

Rebelling against the "formula"

No More Garcia Márquez Wannabes

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Why teach Chronicles instead of 100 Years?

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Why teach Chronicles instead of 100 Years?

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Who was President during the 1980s when the text was written?

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Foreshadowing

Illusions

Symbolism

Imagery/ sensory details

Figurative Language

Littered throughout novella

Repetition

“There was never a death more foretold” (57)

constant drinking

esp w/ coffee

Dialect of characters

Poetic

Blunt

Dramatic

Humor

“bird shit”

“cult of death”

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Strict Gender Roles- Male (Machismo= Duty of a Man) / Female (Pure and Innocent Until Marriage/ Cult of Death)

Central Paternal Role/ Incest?

Latin American Cultural Traditions vs. the Modern World

Obligation/ Duty vs. Desire

Brutality of Religion

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CH. 1- Feeling of "Bird Shit" - Sets the Stage

CH. 2- All About Bayardo and Illusions

CH. 3- But it was an honor killing!

CH. 4- How Santiago Died Twice & Angela the Liar

CH. 5- "He Died Without Understanding His Death"

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-The Basic Premise

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Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America's history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: "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."

Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

No draft had more impact than the one for " One Hundred Years of Solitude." Mr. García Márquez's editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since 'Don Quixote.' " The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."

Mr. García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate "One Hundred Years of Solitude," he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers' eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.
Lived With His Grandparents
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia's Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927, the eldest child of Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Gabriel Elijio García. His father, a postal clerk, telegraph operator and itinerant pharmacist, could barely support his wife and 12 children; Gabriel, the eldest, spent his early childhood living in the large, ramshackle house of his maternal grandparents. The house influenced his writing; it seemed inhabited, he said, by the ghosts his grandmother conjured in the stories she told.

His maternal grandfather, Nicolás Márquez Mejía, a retired army colonel, was also an influence - "the most important figure of my life," Mr. García Márquez said. The grandfather bore a marked resemblance to Colonel Buendía, the protagonist of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and the book's mythical village of Macondo draws heavily on Aracataca.

In his 2002 memoir, " Living to Tell the Tale," Mr. García Márquez recalled a river trip back to Aracataca in 1950, his first trip there since childhood.

"The first thing that struck me," he wrote, "was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the silences in the world. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through undulating glass. As far as the eye could see there was no recollection of human life, nothing that was not covered by a faint sprinkling of burning dust."

Much of his fiction unfolds in or near Macondo, just as William Faulkner, whom he admired, invented Yoknapatawpha County as the Mississippi setting for some of his own novels.

Mr. García Márquez moved to Bogotá as a teenager. He studied law there but never received a degree; he turned instead to journalism. The late 1940s and early '50s in Colombia were a period of civil strife known as La Violencia. The ideological causes were nebulous, but the savagery was stark, as many as 300,000 deaths. La Violencia would become the background for several of his novels.

Mr. García Márquez eked out a living writing for newspapers in Cartagena and then Barranquilla, where he lived in the garret of a brothel and saw a future in literature. "It was a bohemian life: finish at the paper at 1 in the morning, then write a poem or a short story until about 3, then go out to have a beer," he said in an interview in 1996. "When you went home at dawn, ladies who were going to Mass would cross to the other side of the street for fear that you were either drunk or intending to mug or rape them."

He read intensely - the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain and Melville; the Europeans Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Virginia Woolf.

"I cannot imagine how anyone could even think of writing a novel without having at least a vague of idea of the 10,000 years of literature that have gone before," Mr. García Márquez said. But, he added, "I've never tried to imitate authors I've admired. On the contrary, I've done all I could not to imitate them."

As a journalist he scored a scoop when he interviewed a sailor who had been portrayed by the Colombian government as the heroic survivor of a navy destroyer lost at sea. The sailor admitted to him that the ship had been carrying a heavy load of contraband household goods, which unloosed during a storm and caused the ship to list enough to sink. His report, in 1955, infuriated Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the country's dictator, and Mr. García Márquez fled to Europe. He spent two years there as a foreign correspondent.
Unimpressed by Europe
Mr. García Márquez was less impressed by Western Europe than many Latin American writers, who looked to the Old World as their cultural fountainhead. His dispatches often reflected his belief that Europeans were patronizing toward Latin America even though their own societies were in decline.

He echoed these convictions in his Nobel address. Europeans, he said, "insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest for our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them."

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Harper & Row (1970)

"The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood."

Love in the Time of Cholera
Translated by Edith Grossman, Alfred A. Knopf (1988)

"Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion; beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."

Of Love and Other Demons
Translated by Edith Grossman, Alfred A. Knopf (1995)

"The stone shattered at the first blow of a pickax and a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out of the crypt. The foreman, with the help of the laborers, attempted to uncover all the hair, and the more of it they brought out, the longer and more abundant it seemed, until at last the final strands appeared still attached to the skull of a young girl....Spread out on the floor, the splendid hair measured 22 meters, 11 centimeters."

Mr. García Márquez lost his job when his newspaper was shut down by the Rojas Pinilla regime. Stranded in Paris, he scavenged and sold bottles to survive, but he managed to begin a short novel, "In Evil Hour."

While working on that book he took time off in 1957 to complete another short novel, "No One Writes to the Colonel," about an impoverished retired army officer, not unlike the author's grandfather, who waits endlessly for a letter replying to his requests for a military pension. It was published to acclaim four years later. ("In Evil Hour" was also published in the early 1960s.)

Mr. García Márquez alternated between journalism and fiction in the late 1950s. (A multipart newspaper series on a sailor lost at sea for 10 days was later published in book form as "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.") While working for newspapers and magazines in Venezuela, he wrote a short-story collection, "Big Mama's Funeral," which is set in Macondo and incorporates the kind of magical elements he would master in "One Hundred Years of Solitude." From 1959 to 1961 he supported the Castro revolution and wrote for Prensa Latina, the official Cuban press agency.

In 1961 he moved to Mexico City, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life. It was there, in 1965, after a four-year dry spell in which he wrote no fiction, that Mr. García Márquez began "One Hundred Years of Solitude." The inspiration for it, he said, came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.

Returning home, he began an almost undistracted 18 months of writing while his wife, Mercedes, looked after the household. "When I was finished writing," he recalled, "my wife said: 'Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.' "

With the book's publication in 1967, in Buenos Aires, the family never owed a penny again. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was sold out within days.

In following the rise and fall of the Buendía family through several generations of war and peace, affluence and poverty, the novel seemed to many critics and readers the defining saga of Latin America's social and political history.

Mr. García Márquez made no claim to have invented magical realism; he pointed out that elements of it had appeared before in Latin American literature. But no one before him had used the style with such artistry, exuberance and power. Magical realism would soon inspire writers on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably Isabel Allende in Chile and Salman Rushdie in Britain.

"Reality is also the myths of the common people," Mr. García Márquez told an interviewer. "I realized that reality isn't just the police that kill people, but also everything that forms part of the life of the common people."

In 1973, when General Pinochet overthrew Chile's democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who committed suicide, Mr. García Márquez vowed never to write as long as General Pinochet remained in power.

The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 years, but Mr. García Márquez released himself from his vow well before it ended. "I never thought he'd last so long," he said in a 1997 interview with The Washington Post. "Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship."

In 1975 he published his next novel, "The Autumn of the Patriarch," about a dictator in a phantasmagorical Latin American state who rules for so many decades that nobody can recall what life was like before him. As he had predicted, some critics faulted the work for not matching the artistry of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." But others raved about it, and it became a global best seller. He called it his best novel.

In "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," published in 1981, Mr. García Márquez used journalistic techniques to tell a story, apparently drawn from a real incident, in which the brothers of a woman who has lost her virginity murder the man responsible, Santiago Nasar. The brothers announce their intention to avenge their family honor, but because of a variety of odd circumstances, Nasar remains unaware of his impending fate.

"Love in the Time of Cholera," published in 1985, was Mr. García Márquez's most romantic novel, the story of the resumption of a passionate relationship between a recently widowed septuagenarian and the lover she had broken with more than 50 years before.

"The General in His Labyrinth," published in 1989, combined imagination with historical fact to conjure up the last days of Simón Bolívar, the father of South America's independence from Spain. The portrait of the aging Bolívar as a flatulent philanderer, abandoned and ridiculed by his onetime followers, aroused controversy on a continent that viewed him as South America's version of George Washington. But Mr. García Márquez said that his depiction had been drawn from a careful perusal of Bolívar's personal letters.

As his fame grew, Mr. García Márquez - or Gabo, as he was called by friends - enjoyed a lifestyle he would have found inconceivable in his struggling youth. He kept homes in Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Recognizable by his bushy mustache, he dressed fastidiously, preferring a white monotone encompassing linen suits, shirts, shoes and even watchbands.
Devoted to the Left
He contributed his prestige, time and money to left-wing causes. He helped finance a Venezuelan political party. He was a strong defender of the Sandinistas, the leftist revolutionaries who took power in Nicaragua.

For more than three decades the State Department denied Mr. García Márquez a visa to travel in the United States, supposedly because he had been a member of the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s but almost certainly because of his continuing espousal of left-wing causes and his friendship with Mr. Castro. The ban was rescinded in 1995 after President Bill Clinton invited him to Martha's Vineyard.

Mr. García Márquez's ties to Mr. Castro troubled some intellectuals and human rights advocates. Susan Sontag wrote in the 1980s, "To me it's scandalous that a writer of such enormous talent be a spokesperson for a government which has put more people in jail (proportionately to its population) than any other government in the world."

He attributed the criticism to what he called Americans' "almost pornographic obsession with Castro." But he became sensitive enough about the issue to intercede on behalf of jailed Cuban dissidents.

After receiving his cancer diagnosis in 1999, Mr. García Márquez devoted most of his subsequent writing to his memoirs. One exception was the novella "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," about the love affair between a 90-year-old man and a 14-year-old prostitute, published in 2004.

In July 2012, his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that Mr. García Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing. Mr. Pera, the author's editor at Random House Mondadori, said at the time that Mr. García Márquez had been working on a novel, "We'll See Each Other in August," but that no publication date had been scheduled. The author seemed disinclined to have it published, Mr. Pera said: "He told me, 'This far along I don't need to publish more.' "

Dozens of television and film adaptations were made of Mr. García Márquez's works, but none achieved the critical or commercial success of his writing, and he declined requests for the movie rights to "One Hundred Years of Solitude." The novel's readers, he once said, "always imagine the characters as they want, as their aunt or their grandfather, and the moment you bring that to the screen, the reader's margin for creativity disappears."

Besides his wife, Mercedes, his survivors include two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Mr. García Márquez attributed his rigorous, disciplined schedule in part to his sons. As a young father he took them to school in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon. During the interval - from 8 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon - he would write.

"When I finished one book, I wouldn't write for a while," he said in 1966. "Then I had to learn how to do it all over again. The arm goes cold; there's a learning process you have to go through again before you rediscover the warmth that comes over you when you are writing."

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Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87

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Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America's history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: "Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination.

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold- GarciaMarquez.docx

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Spanish to English Translation = botched rhythm/ poetic feel

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Born March 6, 1927 (Aracataca, Colombia)

Luisa Santiaga Márquez

Gabriel Elijio García (postal clerk/ telegraph operator/ itinerant pharmacist)

spent 1st 8 yrs. w/ maternal grandparents

Education=

most important literary sources=

stories about Aracataca and his fam that grandpa Nic shared

Studied law/ Became a journalist

Employment

late 1950s- early 1960s

Bogotá, Colombia & New York City (Prensa Latina news service)

Died April 17, 2014 (Mexico City, Mexico)

lymphatic cancer (1999)

senile dymentia (2012)

Who Was He/ Why Care?

Colombian novelist

Best known Latin American writer in Latin American history

one of greatest writers of 20th cent.

best known w/ Jorge Luis Borges

Excellent Short Stories

Accomplished Journalist

Accessible to the common reader

BUT also pleasing demanding critiques

Works

Setting of most novels=

provincial Colombia

medieval/ modern practices & beliefs clash

comically/ tragically

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Noticia de un Secuestro (1996, News of a Kidnapping, journalists chronicle)

drug- related kidnappings in Colombia

Vivir Para Contarla (2002, Living to Tell the Tale, memoir)

written after diagnosed w/ cancer

first 30 yrs of life

Memoria de Mis Putas Tristes (2004, Memories of my Melancholy Whores, novel)

lonely man finds meaning of love when hires virginal prostitute to celebrate 90th bday

Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature (1982)

Cien Años de Soledad (1967)

masterpiece

100 Years of Solitude

4th Latin American to win Nobel Prize for Lit

Comparable to?

William Faulkner

Ernest Hemingway

Why?

minutely woven plots

brief/ tightly knit narratives

Miguel de Cervantes

Why?

easy flow of intricate stories

irony

humor