Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Part of the Process

Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process. 

There are entire books dedicated to the life of an author as prominent and influential in the past century as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Arguably South America’s best known author in recent history, and a truly colourful figure, his legacy looms large over modern fiction, magical realism and Latin American writing. But Garcia Marquez didn’t always have an easy journey towards becoming the icon he is today. 

Born in March 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, Garcia Marquez was largely raised by his maternal grandparents. His parents had a tumultuous early relationship, because his grandparents did not approve of his father, a conservative who had the reputation of being a womanizer. But his father wooed his mother with violin serenades, love poems, letters and telephone messages even when he was not allowed to see her. Their courtship was later dramatised in Love in the Time of Cholera, one of his best-known novels. When the family finally granted his mother permission to marry, the couple moved to Barranquilla where his father became a pharmacist, while Gabriel spent the first decade or so of his life raised by his maternal grandparents. 

His grandfather was a veteran of the Thousand Days War, was highly respected and an excellent storyteller. His grandmother similarly contributed to his later work, a source of “magical, superstitious and supernatural views” which she always delivered as though they were irrefutable truths. Thanks to a government scholarship, Gabriel was sent to study near Bogota as a teenager, and then continued to live there and study law to please his father, while developing an interest in the literary. He was deeply influenced by Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and began to write short stories for magazines around that time. 

Because of riots following the assassination of a popular leader in 1948, the twenty one year old Marquez never completed his degree since the university closed indefinitely and his boarding house was burned down. He transferred to university in Cartagena and began working as a journalist, then back to Barranquilla to work in a newspaper. He never completed his degree but did receive many honorary doctorates much later in life. 

He spent the next few years writing as a journalist and film critic for various newspapers, becoming part of a group of writers and journalists called the ‘Barranquilla Group’, became increasingly involved in leftist politics, and was inspired by the works of writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. He was briefly sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, and then took up a position in Venezuela in 1957, where he witnessed a coup, before returning to Colombia to marry his childhood sweetheart. His wife, Mercedes Barcha, was known to Marquez from the time they were children at school - he met her when he was 12 and she was 9, and folklore suggests that she waited for him through university and his early career before they finally married in 1958, when Marquez returned to Colombia. 

His first novella, Leaf Storm, was published in 1955 after a seven year wait to find a publisher, and did not meet with much success. He wrote two other novels after, including ‘In Evil Hour’ (originally titled La Pueblo del mierda or ‘This Shitty Town’!) but was disheartened by the lack of sufficient response. He gave up writing for nearly five years, traveled by Greyhound across southern America because he was so inspired by Faulkner, and moved his family to Mexico City in the early 1960s. 

After that period, the idea for One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him while driving to Acapulco. He turned the car around and drove back to Mexico City, then wrote for nearly eighteen months straight, doing no other work, selling his car to support the family, asking for credit from landlords, bakers and butchers, and being supported by the work of his wife until the novel was complete. After publication in 1967, the book became a commercial success and has gone on to be the most successful South American novel of all time, selling over 50 million copies. 

The book was translated to English by Cuban-American literature professor Gregory Rabassa, who worked as a cryptologist during the World War II. Rabassa knew seven languages and he was recommended to García Márquez by a friend. Marquez waited almost a whole year for Rabassa to be available, and when the English version of 'Cien años de soledad' was out, Gabriel García told his translator that it was better than his original work. 

The fame, literary success and reputation that the novel garnered Garcia Marquez led him to move his family to Barcelona in the mid 1970s as he worked on later novels. This same fame also led to him becoming a negotiator between the Colombian government and guerilla rebels including FARC and the 19th of April movement. He also met various leaders and became a close friend of the infamous Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Due to this friendship, Garcia Marquez was considered a ‘subversive’ by the US government and refused visas for many years until the ban was lifted by Bill Clinton’s administration in the nineties, with Clinton citing One Hundred Years of Solitude amongst his favourite books. 

During his time in Barcelona, Garcia Marquez became friends with the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, another widely celebrated writer. But their friendship soured over the years, culminating in Vargas Llosa punching Garcia Marquez at a theater in Mexico City in the early 1980s. Various theories about why the feud escalated have since emerged - some blame political disagreements, others say Vargas Llosa’s reputation as a womaniser left his wife estranged and he became jealous that she grew close to Garcia Marquez and Mercedes, while others blame professional envy. 

Over those two decades, Garcia Marquez wrote many more successful novels, including Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and News of A Kidnapping, while also being a prominent public figure throughout Latin America and beyond. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and became the most translated South American writer ever. From the late nineties, however, he began to suffer from various health problems and his output became less prolific as he worked primarily on his autobiography. 

In 1999, he was misdiagnosed with pneumonia instead of lymphatic cancer, and hospitalised for weeks before finally receiving chemotherapy at a hospital in Los Angeles. In 2000, the Peruvian newspaper La Republica wrongly reported his impending death, and published a poem that was believed to be a farewell written by Garcia Marquez himself, which was then picked up by various other publications around the globe. But for one, he survived the cancer and lived for another 14 years, and for another, the poem was not written by him but by an obscure Mexican ventriloquist who wrote the poem to perform for his puppet and gained temporary fame from the absurd incident. 

In the last decade or so of his life, his output understandably slowed, and he passed away in Mexico City in 2014 with eulogies and obituaries around the world recognising his enormous impact on literature in general and Latin America in particular. There are far more incidents and legacies that there isn’t time to go into here, but his own autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, as well as the outstanding biography by Silvana Paternostro that gives us Garcia Marquez from the perspectives of those around him are a great place to start learning more about him. Or, you know, just picking up one of his many masterpieces.