Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez is an author.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez trained as a journalist and never really stopped being one, which is why the fantastic material in his novels is reported rather than dreamed: a rain of flowers or a levitating priest arrives with the same flat certainty as a bus timetable. He left law school in Bogota, wrote for Colombian and Cuban papers, and published his first novel in 1955. The Nobel came in 1982. He was a lifelong friend of Fidel Castro, which cost him readers and visas, and he wrote about Latin American dictatorship from close enough to be uncomfortable.
Books (32)
- Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004)
- La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile (1993)
- Collected Stories (1984)
- El olor de la guayaba (1982)
- Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1972)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude (2007)
- Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (2006)
- El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (2006)
- La mala hora (2006)
- Vivir para contarla (2002)
- Otoño Del Patriarca (1999)
- Cien años de soledad (1999)
- El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1997)
- Doce cuentos peregrinos (1997)
- Relato de un náufrago (1996)
- Del amor y otros demonios (1994)
- Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1993)
- World Literature (1992)
- The Best of Granta Travel (1991)
- El general en su laberinto (1991)
- The General (1990)
- Fiction 100 (1988)
- Ojos de perro azul (1987)
- Inframundo (1984)
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1984)
- La hojarasca (1983)
- La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (1979)
- The Autumn of the Patriarch (1977)
- Seis cuentos latino-americanos (1969)
- Spanish Short Stories 1 — Cuentos hispánicos 1 (1966)
Where to start with Gabriel García Márquez
Most of what the catalogue holds is in Spanish, so pick by appetite rather than by language. Cien años de soledad is the one everyone starts with and the one that most rewards a second reading years later. El amor en los tiempos del cólera is slower and stranger about patience. Crónica de una muerte anunciada is short, structured like a police report, and the best entry point if the long novels have defeated you before. El coronel no tiene quien le escriba is leaner still.
The major novels
The long books, most of them held in Spanish here. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the door everyone comes through, and The Autumn of the Patriarch is the hardest of them, a dictator novel written in sentences that run for pages.
The short novels
Where a new reader should probably start. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a hundred pages structured like an inquest, and No One Writes to the Colonel is leaner still, a study of waiting for a pension that never arrives.
The journalism and the stories
He was a reporter first and kept going back to it. The shipwreck account and the Chile book are straight journalism, the memoir covers the years before the fame, and the story collections are where several famous novels were first tried out.
Gabriel García Márquez on CrossBinge
- Read It First: The Unadaptable Novel Has Three Weeks Left
- For fans of: For fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: what to watch, read and play next