The passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the world's man of letters By:Abubakar Waziri

The Noble-prize winning, Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away last week at his home in Mexico City at the age of 87 after he was hospitalized and treated from pneumonia according to a close source to his family. Marquez is considered one of the most popular writers in Latin America. He strove for years to establish himself as novelist .He published several articles, stories and novels among them is the "leaf storm" and "No one writes to the Colonel". Garcia Marquez's major work is his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude with which he had attained a vast reputation in 1967. It had won him Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. More than 30 million copies of 100 Years of Solitude were sold around the world. The masterpiece novel had given an impetus to the Latin America Fiction. In his story –telling, he blended between miraculous events and every day details and political facts in Latin America. Garcia commented that he had inspired his novel from his childhood memoirs of legends and folklore tales recounted by his grandmother and they presented the probity of characters. Marquez is a leading exponent of magical realism, a literary style that combines magic, myths and extra-ordinary phenomena.
The Swedish Royal Academy upon awarding Nobel Prize to Gabriel Marquez, praised him as someone who led to realism converge with fantasy. Other flamboyant works of Marques Garcia are "The autumn of Patriarch" "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Chronicles of fore-told death".
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Columbian journalist, publisher and political activist was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small village on the Columbia's Caribbean coast. He spent most of his life in Europe and Mexico. He is known affectionately to his family and friends as "Gabo". Marques is regarded one of pre-eminent writers of magic realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude is an example of this kind of literature. After The success of that novel, his genre extended to the rest of writings in the sixtieth. In 2007, the Spain's royal Academy of Language circulated a popular memorial print of One Hundred Years of Solitude as part of the greatest Spanish Classics. One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered as one of the most influential works in Latin America and the most important novel in the history of Spanish language according to the 4th International Congress of Spanish Language held in Cartagena in 2007. Garcia is a gifted genius political writer. He befriended the political Castro and that provoked much controversy in the arena of politics and literature. Gabriel owned houses in Bagota, Spain, the Indies, yet he spent most of his life at his home in Mexico.
Translated by kamal Ahmad Musa

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