A Guest Post by Monica Leslie
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on the 6th of March in 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. Gabriel Marquez was born to his father, Gabriel Garcia, and his mother, Luisa Marquez. Gabriel’s father was a pharmacist who moved with his wife to Barranquilla leaving their son in Aracataca to be raised by his maternal grandparents. As Gabriel grew up he always had an interest in literature and writing novels. Gabriel Marquez is best known for his novels such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”. Although the novel that started Marquez’s career was the novel he had written at the age of 18. This novella was titled “Leaf Storm”. Gabriel Marquez took each of the ideas for his novels from his own experiences in his life.
Leaf Storm, Marquez’s first novella was published in 1955 after seven years of writing, editing, concentration and searching for a publisher. Leaf Storm is a story about an old colonel who attempted to give a proper Christian burial to a not so popular French doctor. The only people who support the colonel are his daughter and grandson. Leaf Storm explores a child’s very first experiences with death by following their stream of consciousness. The novella also includes the colonel’s daughter, Isabel’s, point of view. The entire novella is based on Gabriel Marquez’s childhood and what happened in the years he was a child. His novel helped change the lives of people who had lost someone to death by showing them that they are not alone, and that everyone loses somebody to the hands of death at some point of their lives.
When Garcia Marquez was 18, he had always wanted to create a novel based on his grandparents and the home in which he grew up in. However, he was having immense difficulty to find an appropriate tone and had put off the idea of writing the novel until one day the answer came to him while he was driving his family to the city of Acapulco. The story chronicled the generations of the Buendia family. The Buendia family founded the fictional village of Macondo. Through the family’s trials, tribulations, instances of incest, birthings, and deaths. Most of the critics who read the novel which is titled One hundred years of Solitude, didn’t realize that the story was a bit of a joke. One Hundred Years of Solitude helped people realize that all families go through their own hardships and that they must either run from those hardships or face them like the Buendia family.
Not long after publishing his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez decided to delve into the realm of filmmaking and opera. Marquez soon after became a film critic and he founded and served as an executive director of The Film Institute of Havana. He soon after became the head manager of the Latin American Film Foundation or LAFF. The very first script he worked on was a script for Juan Rulfo’s El gallo de oro. Eventually Garcia Marquez wrote his Erendira as a screenplay which somehow ended up getting lost and he then decided to replace it with the novella. The film was released in Mexico in the year of 1983.
16 years later in 1999, Garcia was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, a cancerous tumor that originated in his lymph nodes. He was sent to a hospital in Los Angeles, California where he went through Chemotherapy which in turn, proved to be successful and the illness went into remission. Even though he was still alive, Marquez immediately began writing out his memoirs for when his death finally arrived. His death was incorrectly reported in 2000 by a Peruvian newspaper. In 2005 Marquez stated that it had been the first year in his life where he had not written one line of story or poem. In 2008 Garcia finished a new novel called “We’ll meet in August”. Four years later, Jaime Marquez, Garcia’s brother announced that Garcia was suffering from dementia. Two years later in April of 2014, Garcia Marquez died of pneumonia at the age of 87. Garcia’s final novel “We’ll meet in August” helped people to realize that a life isn’t a life unless lived to it’s fullest and that it’s never too late to change your life around when you think you cannot.
Monica. The kindergarten teacher somewhere in United Kingdom. Her most favorite hobby is travelling, meeting new cultures and cooking and reading books. If you are interested in most mysterious places in the world, have a look at her posts to attend those amazing trips for free.
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