Gabriel García Márquez died last Thursday. The great writer was 87.
The Colombian writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Marquez was a leading practitioner of magic realism, which is style that incorporates fantastic or magical elements into otherwise normal situations. That is a poor label because is assumes that reality is a known. Reality is the undiscovered country and one man’s magic is another’s everyday experience.
But Marquez was no doctrinaire schoolman–that God! His One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the great novels from the past century or any century. After enjoying it immensely, I, as is my usual practice, became an enthusiast for a time. None of his other novels captured me the way Solitude did but were nonetheless enjoyable.
I salute the great writer on his passing.