Gabriel García Márquez: The Man Who Made Magic True

 How Gabriel García Márquez Re-Wrote the Rules of Reality — and Science Fiction Gabriel García Márquez, or “Gabo,” was one of the most powerful modern literary figures. His instinct for merging the surreal with the mundane, creating worlds in which the miraculous is no more remarkable than breathing, became a literary movement of its own — magical realism.

Late last year, through his inimitable voice, he brought the Latin American storytelling tradition, full of folklore and politics and human emotion, to the world. From his beginnings in journalism to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, García Márquez was all about storytelling power and his fame endures around the world.

Gabriel García Márquez Born of Myths, Raised by Legends García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in the small town of Aracataca, Colombia.Brought up by maternal grandparents, he grew up in a universe where real life and fantasy mingled seamlessly. His liberal grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, a veteran of Colombia’s civil wars, ingrained in him a profound respect for justice, bravery, and the cycles of history.

His grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán, was a font of folklore, superstition and ghost stories that seemed to him more real than the world in which he lived.

The book was his way of reconciling this; and thus these twinned influences became the foundation of his narrative voice. In subsequent interviews, García Márquez would cite his grandmother’s straight-faced recounting of supernatural anecdotes as a major source of his inclination toward grandiose realism. To the young Gabriel, spirits, portents and miracles were not strange oddities, but simply essential parts of life.

Aracataca, portrayed with little attempt at disguise in One Hundred Years of Solitude as the fictional Macondo, would figure prominently in his work as a small town, a microcosm of Latin America with all its historical and social intricacies. In Macondo, García Márquez built an eraless, allegorical place where history recurs and characters live in an almost mythic time warp.

Writing Fiction from Journalism: From the Facts to the Fakes García Márquezbecame world famous as a novelist, but his career began with and also encompassed reportage, which would influence his later work in important ways. During the 1940s and ’50s he contributed to major Colombian newspapers, including El Universal and El Espectador. He also traveled to various parts of Latin America and Europe as a journalist, writing about politics and human interest topics.

He accrued a sharpened eye for detail, a nuanced sense of narrative pacing a rooted sensitivity for political undercurrents in these years. A number of his later novels reflect this time. For instance, Chronicle of a Death Foretold feels like an investigative report into a murder that the whole town knew was going to happen but did nothing to prevent. The melding of documentarian structure and lyrical prose gave the story a searing, near-accusing atmosphere that must make readers consider their implication in collective guilt.

García Márquez liked to say he was a journalist before he was a novelist. Journalism for him wasn’t just a steppingstone; it was a foundational discipline and a way to process how to see the world clearly and a way to honor “the true behind the truth” of appearances.