Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Who is Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
Below are just a few videos which provide some insight into the literary giant that is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez, a Colombian author, is a Nobel Prize winnter for literature and is often credited as being the master of magical realism. His most famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is often said to be one of the best books ever written.
"The legacy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez"
"Gabriel García Márquez: What To Know About The Master Of Magical Realism"
"Obituary: Gabriel Garcia Marquez" BBC News
What is Magical Realism?
Integral to the study of Latin American literature, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez specifically, is the literary genre and movement known as magical realism. This literary genre and movement was popularized by Latin American writers such as Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chile's Isabel Allende, Mexico's Laura Esquivel, Brazil's Jorge Amado, and Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, to name but a few. In fact, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is perhaps the most famous example of magical realism in literature. Check out the slides below to learn a little more about this artistic and literary movement.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It follows a journalist, with some parallels to Marquez himself, as he returns to his hometown where a baffling murder took place twenty-seven years earlier. He is determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to try and stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.
The novella is written in a journalistic style with an interesting structure and intriguing plot. It explores themes such as face, fiction, and memory; gender, class, and social restrictions; fate vs. free will; the community and ritual; and themes of violence and justice.
Click the image of the book cover to access a Think Tank version of the text.
Also, click the buttons below for close reading practice by completing the Explode a Quote exercises.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Short Stories
Below are a collection of short stories from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Click the image to find a PDF version of the text. They all exemplify the genre of magical realism, in addition to themes of gender, class, religion, justice, and growth.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Widely acknowledged as Gabriel García Márquez’s finest work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the fictional Colombian town Macondo and the rise and fall of its founders, the Buendía family. Revealed through intriguing temporal folds, characters inherit the names and dispositions of their family, unfolding patterns that double and recur. The mighty José Arcadio Buendía goes from intrepid, charismatic founder of Macondo to a madman on its fringes. Macondo fights off plagues of insomnia, war, and rain. Mysteries are spun out of almost nothing.
This beguilingly colorful saga also works out a wider social and political allegory—sometimes too surreal to be plausible, at times more real than any conventional realism could afford. An exemplification of so-called magic realism, this allegorical texture incorporates a sense of the strange, fantastic, or incredible. Perhaps the key sociopolitical example is the apparent massacre by the army of several thousand striking workers whose dead bodies seem to have been loaded into freight trains before being dumped in the sea. Against the smoke screen of the official version, the massacre becomes a nightmare lost in the fog of martial law. The disappeared’s true history takes on a reality stranger than any conventional fiction, demanding fiction for the truth to be told.
William Kennedy wrote for the National Observer that One Hundred Years of Solitude is “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Read THIS ARTICLE to learn a little more about the novel and why it is a modern classic.
I strongly encourage everyone to read this masterpiece at least once in their lifetime. I have never been so impacted by a novel as I have with One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is my all-time favourite piece of literature and I make an attempt to read it every year. Read the first chapter - this will definitely hook you and encourage you to read the rest.
Highlighting Student Work!
Grade 10 (Year 11) Video Essays - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In 2021, my grade 10 class at the American International School of Egypt, Cairo engaged with a Latin American unit and, specifically, explored Gabriel Garzia Marquez's body of work, including various short stories, novellas such as Chronicle of a Death Foretold and No One Writes to the Colonel, and even his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. They then completed analyzed these texts in groups and created video essays to detail their findings. Here are just a few examples below.
"A Feminist Criticism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude"
"Gabriel Garcia Marquez Short Stories BOW - Feminist Criticism"
"Gabriel Garcia Marquez's No One Writes to the Colonel - Marxist Criticism"
"Gender Socialization in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold"