Gabriel José García Márquez, Latin-American writer.

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez (1928-2014)

Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, Columbia. Starting by writing columns and stories for a Liberal newspaper, Gabo is now known as one of the most remarkable storytellers of the 20th century. In 1981, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor, the highest decoration France gives to a foreigner. He won a Nobel Prize For Literature in 1982. He recently passed away on April 17^th, 2014 due to lymphatic cancer.

This Latin-American writer has described the dense interlacing of fact and fiction in his labour of love as an author of both fantastic stories and undeterred journalistic records, both of which thought about the horrible colonial ravage and misuse and the resulting rule of merciless dictators in a great part of the Southern Hemisphere in the best way possible.

Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez is known as the Master of Magical Realism. Luis Leal, an internationally recognized scholar defines Magic Realism as “an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles in closed or open structures” (Luis Leal, 1995. p. 119-123). Literature of this type is characterized by components of the fantastic woven into the story with a dull feeling of presentation. The two worlds of the magic and the real are expressed as the living and the dead. Writers like Gabo in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, Luis Borges in Argentina are linked to be using the method of magical realism in their writings. These writers represent the most ordinary events along with fantastic and dreamlike elements in their writings. It blurs the understanding of what is serious or trivial, tragic or comic, unpleasant or over-the-top. Living and dead impart their destinies on the earth and take it as commonplace that life at the outset of things and also the end. These authors have picked Magic Realism as their story procedure to fill such gaps portraying the viscous circle of life and death as one of the significant topics in these works.

He was a believer. Gabo’s brightly coloured, rightly paced, crystal clear expressed style has influenced hundreds of authors around the world. He was a genius at condensing the long war periods, defeats, exploitation of the banana, all in one swift volume, combining it to a whirling century of life-changing prose. For its huge number of incredible components, the 1967 novel for which García Márquez is best known—One Hundred Years of Solitude—catches the practically extraordinary human history of the area with more emotional and good devotion than any strictly factual account. He based his novel in a fictional town called Macondo. When one reads the novel, it is like revisiting the past experiences of the colonised. It seems less magical. It is just plain real. Colombia's interminable and continuous history of fear and civil war that has executed many thousands and rendered millions homeless. At that point the surreal gets to be ordinary and the insane gets to be judicious, that is the well that magic realism draws from.

One Hundred years of Solitude is a masterpiece. He sums up the biblical history of the Buendia's family of generations of rebirth that does not repeat if it is questioned. It parallels the history of macondo with that of Latin- America. It is the advancement, debauchery, remodel of the vitals of human bile in belief system. Garcia refers to the massacres of Santa Marta from 1947 to 1957 as Banana Massacres in his novel. This being the first novel to utilize mysterious authenticity attained a great position in the society. There is an instance in the book when the blood of a dead son travels all through the village to wind up at the feet of his mother. There is also emphasis on the cyclic nature of time. The novel deals with cultural creation and destruction. This work tries to destabilize the fixity created by the colonisers.

The magic realist text reflects in its dialect of narration true states of discourse and cognition inside the genuine social relations of a post-colonial society, a reflection Garcia Marquez thematizes in One Hundred A long time of Solitude as a "speaking mirror.” The “speaking mirror” sustains an inward as well as outward reflection into the language of narration by foregrounding the gaps, foreshortening of history and representation of transcendental regionalism.

There are many criticisms for this piece for being a “colonial hangover” that the whites use to marginalize the fiction of the “other.” Some critics also feel that the term is too limiting.

References-

Slemon, S. (2011, June 11). MAGIC REALISM AS POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE. Retrieved September 1, 2014.

Jones, J. (2014, April 18). Read 10 Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Interviews). Retrieved September 1, 2014.

White, E. (2014, April 18). Others had used magic realism. García Márquez made the technique his own. Retrieved September 1, 2014.