The Patriach Will No Longer Write

Writing in Spanish for an audience that would ultimately straddle linguistic borders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel prize-winning Colombian writer and journalist, who died at the age of 87 at his home in Mexico City on 17 April 2014, propagated and symbolised the universal enchantment of readers for “magic realism”.

To be sure, “Gabo” or “Gabito”, as he was affectionately called, was not the creator of this genre of literature that involves the narration of the most fantastic and grotesquely imagined happenings, embellished with magic, miracles, dreams, anecdotes, superstitions, myths, folklore, legends, gossip, memory, violence, politics and history – and all, in the most mundane and realistic fashion. The credit for that style of writing must be given to other literary giants who preceded Marquez in the Latin American literary boom of the 1950s and 1960s, like Borges and Carpentier, Rulfo and Cortazar. But it was Marquez who, with his 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, gave magic realism a kind of universal currency. The book, the second novel by an impoverished writer, cooped up in Mexico during an 18-month self-imposed exile, became an instant hit in the entire Latin American continent.