{"id":2395,"date":"2014-04-22T12:32:39","date_gmt":"2014-04-22T11:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2395"},"modified":"2014-04-24T07:58:13","modified_gmt":"2014-04-24T06:58:13","slug":"gabo-the-death-of-gabriel-garcia-marquez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2395","title":{"rendered":"Gabo:\u00a0 The Death of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"garcia<\/a>\u2018He\u2019s won, he\u2019s won,\u2019 Guillo shouted excitedly.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t think what he was talking about.\u00a0 The Ecuadorian bar was filling up with excited revellers ordering brandies, even though it was only eleven in the morning.\u00a0 It was 1982 and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez had just won the Nobel prize.\u00a0 It had been announced on Radio Grande de Bah\u00eda, so it had to be true.\u00a0 Although Colombian, the town was treating him as if he were a local boy.<\/p>\n

My friend Guillo was impressed that he was using the money to fund his own independent newspaper:\u00a0 he had read all M\u00e1rquez\u2019s books – they were piled high in the local stationery shop, along with the comics and murder stories.<\/p>\n

And Gabo\u00a0remains one of the few recent novelists to combine huge literary acclaim with matching commercial success.\u00a0 When have you ever seen a Martin Amis book in a Tesco?<\/p>\n

M\u00e1rquez was writing of their world, with its perpetual llovizna<\/em>, that wonderful word for a soft drizzle of rain playing over the dampness of the platanales, <\/em>the banana-plantations, while the oceano n\u00edtido<\/em>, the bright ocean, stood off in the distance. The predominant mood in his books was one of nostalgia, \u2018tratando de recomponer con tantas astillas dispersas el espejo roto de la memoria<\/em>, trying to reconstitute so many scattered shards of the broken mirror of the memory,\u2019 a nostalgia weighed down with decay.\u00a0 In La Cr\u00f3nica de una Muerte Anunciada (The Chronicle of a Death Foretold)<\/em>, the townsfolk had not been able to find a fridge big enough for the body of the title:\u00a0 there was a\u00a0 police colonel who took a correspondence course in spiritualism;\u00a0 the gold coin they found in the dead man\u2019s corpse was one that he had swallowed when he was six years old and the favourite dish of the archbishop was a soup of cocks\u2019 crests.<\/p>\n

I have come back time and again to the way Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u00a0plays with memory \u2013 in some ways every one of his novels could include the \u2018Foretold\u2019 tagline as he is a great one for telling you what the plot is going to be at the start of proceedings (\u2018this is X who will die many years later from unrequited love\u2019), so that you then read to see not what is going to happen but how.<\/p>\n

And for the way\u00a0no novelist since Proust has had a more acute sense of smell than M\u00e1rquez, see my piece a few years back on Love in the Time of Cholera<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Farewell Letter ~ Gabriel Garcia\u00a0Marquez<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018He\u2019s won, he\u2019s won,\u2019 Guillo shouted excitedly. I couldn\u2019t think what he was talking about.\u00a0 The Ecuadorian bar was filling up with excited revellers ordering brandies, even though it was only eleven in the morning.\u00a0 It was 1982 and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez had just won the Nobel prize.\u00a0 It had been announced on Radio Grande […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,7,1],"tags":[120],"class_list":["post-2395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-peru","category-uncategorized","tag-marquez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2395"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2415,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395\/revisions\/2415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}