‘Macondo York’: The gaze of a García Márquez overwhelmed by the Big Apple
Designer Iván Onatra rescues in a graphic book the turbulent six months the Colombian writer spent in the US city
Showing posts with label García Márquez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label García Márquez. Show all posts
Friday, June 5, 2026
‘Macondo York’ / The gaze of a García Márquez overwhelmed by the Big Apple
Monday, April 20, 2026
Márquez overtakes Cervantes as most translated Spanish-language writer
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| Gabriel García Márquez París, 1990 Photo by Ulf Andersen |
Márquez overtakes Cervantes as most translated Spanish-language writer
Author of One Hundred Years of Solitude tops list of those most translated into 10 languages this century ahead of Don Quixote creator
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Gabriel García Márquez: 'I felt close to him immediately'
Gabriel García Márquez
Photo by Colita
Interview
Gabriel García Márquez: 'I felt close to him immediately'
Translator Edith Grossman believes Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the great novels of the 20th century
Susanna Rustin
Saturday 26 April 2026
Monday, October 31, 2022
In Memory of My Parents / The Late Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha
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| Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha |
In Memory of My Parents,
the Late Gabriel García Márquez and
Mercedes Barcha
Rodrigo Garcia Shares Formative Memories
of His Mother and Father
August 2, 2021
Most of my father’s drafts of work-in-progress were salvaged by my mother behind his back, because he was strictly against showing or preserving unfinished work. Many times during our childhood, my brother and I were summoned to sit on the floor of his study and help him rip up entire previous versions and throw them out—an unhappy image, I am sure, for collectors and students of his process. His papers and his reference library went to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and my mom took great pleasure in the opening ceremonies of that collection. Both my brother’s family and mine were there, and she enjoyed and took shelter in the company of her grandchildren.
The masters who influenced the Latin American Boom
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| William Faulkner |
The masters who influenced the Latin American Boom
Vargas Llosa and García Márquez took cues from Faulkner
Edmundo Paz Soldán
November 21, 2012
For some time now I have been planning to give a course on William Faulkner's influence on the on the so-called Boom in Latin American writing that began in the 1960s. The course would begin with Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who said that this American writer was the first novelist he read with pencil and paper at hand, trying to "rationally" reconstruct the architecture of his novels, see the workings of the complex play of chronology and point of view.
Friday, February 4, 2022
Love & Food in the Time of Cartagena
A lavender door in Cartagena, a UNESCO World Heritage City.
Love & Food in the Time of Cartagena
Jeff Vonder Schmidt
16 April 2016
“The very life of the colonial city was an illusion of memory.” Gabriel García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera.
My first impression of Cartagena de Indias was of its doors. Some were closed, others open, but they were all beautiful, redolent of a deceased Spanish power that was ultimately unable to control the collision of races and cultures populating its New World and that still search for ways to share life together. In Cartagena, Beethoven’s Fate slams on doors with weighty brass knockers, ancient Janus opens both ways, while Márquez’s dogmatic Bishop in Love and Other Demons conducts his exorcisms with the eternal pounding of sinister fear.
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Who is Susana Cato, with whom Gabriel García Márquez had a daughter?
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| Gabriel García Márquez |
Who is Susana Cato, with whom Gabriel García Márquez had a daughter?
The journalist Gustavo Tatis confirmed the information that was revealed about the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had a daughter, Indira Cato, daughter also of the writer Susana Cato, the young woman studied Dramatic Literature and Theater at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
García Márquez Had Secret Mexican Daughter
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| Gabriel García Márquez |
Colombian Author García Márquez Had Secret Mexican Daughter
Márquez died in Mexico City in 2014, where thousands of his readers lined up to see his casket in a concert hallAstrid Suárez
January 17, 2022
For decades renowned Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez kept the public from knowing about an intimate aspect of his life: He had a daughter with a Mexican writer, with whom he had an extramarital affair in the early 1990s.
García Márquez / The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother
by Gabriel García Márquez
Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous mansion of moon like concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled down to its foundations with the first attack. But Erendira and her grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the bathroom decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman baths they scarcely paid any attention to the caliber of the wind.
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
Rodrigo García / A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes / Review
A warm homage filled with both fond and painful memories.
An account of the days of a remarkable couple.
In a slender, affectionate memoir, film director and screenwriter Garcia pays tribute to his father, Nobel Prize–winning author Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), and his mother, Mercedes Barcha, who died in 2020. His father’s life, Garcia reflects, seemed to him “one of the most fortunate and privileged” ever enjoyed by a Latin American. Yet Garcia was impelled to make “a deliberate, if unconscious choice” to distance himself from his father’s fame by living and working in Los Angeles. He traveled frequently to Mexico during his father’s final years, when García Márquez descended into dementia, able to recall only those whom he saw daily—a secretary, driver, cook, and, of course, his beloved wife. When Garcia and his brother visited, he looked at them “with uninhibited curiosity” but no recognition. The man they were speaking to, though welcoming, was “hardly there at all.” However, his death, while expected, still felt like a shock. “Beyond the sadness,” Garcia writes, “is the disbelief that such an exuberant, expansive man, forever intoxicated with life and with the travails of the living, has been extinguished.” When his mother died six years later, the sense of loss was compounded. “The death of the second parent is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that has always been there,” he writes. “It has vanished, with its religion, its customs, its own peculiar habits and rituals, big and small. The echo remains.” Although his parents were determined to keep their personal lives private from inquiring journalists and literary fans, Garcia recounts in sensitive detail his father’s last days. “My father,” he writes, “complained that one of the things he hated most about death was that it was the only aspect of his life he would not be able to write about.” His son sensitively completes the story, and he includes family photos.
A warm homage filled with both fond and painful memories.
Gabriel García Márquez by Rodrigo García
A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes
By Rodrigo García
Rodrigo García’s new memoir, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, recounts the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez, in close detail. Amid family discussions and trips to the doctor, García explores the challenge of writing about grief while living within it. In the below excerpt, García documents the aftermath of his father’s dementia diagnosis and considers the emotional weight of the memory loss upon the renowned writer.
Writing about the death of loved ones must be about as old as writing itself, and yet the inclination to do it instantly ties me up in knots. I am appalled that I am thinking of taking notes, ashamed as I take notes, disappointed in myself as I revise notes. What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter chooses you, and so resistance could be futile.
A few months earlier a friend asked how my dad was doing with his loss of memory. I told her he lives strictly in the present, unburdened by the past, free of expectations for the future. Forecasting based on previous experience, which is believed to be of evolutionary significance as well as one of the origins of storytelling, no longer plays a part in his life.
“So he doesn’t know he’s mortal,” she concluded. “Lucky him.”
Of course, the picture I painted for her is simplified. It is dramatized. The past still plays a part in his conscious life. He relies on the distant echo of his considerable interpersonal skills to ask anyone he meets a series of safe questions: “How is everything?” “Where are you living these days?” “How are your people?” Occasionally he’ll venture an attempt at a more ambitious exchange and become disoriented in the middle of it, losing the thread of the idea or running out of words. The puzzled expression on his face, as well as the embarrassment that crosses it momentarily, like a puff of smoke in a breeze, betrays a past when conversation was as natural to him as breathing. Creative, funny, evocative, provocative conversation. Being a great conversador was almost as highly regarded among his oldest group of friends as being a good writer.
The future is also not completely behind him. Often at dusk he asks, “Where are we going tonight? Let’s go out to a fun place. Let’s go dancing. Why? Why not?” If you change the subject enough times, he moves on.
He recognizes my mother and addresses her as Meche, Mercedes, La Madre, or La Madre Santa. There were a few very difficult months not long ago when he remembered his lifelong wife but considered the woman in front of him claiming to be her to be an impostor.
“Why is she here giving orders and running the house if she is nothing to me?”
My mother reacted to this with anger.
“What is wrong with him?” she asked in disbelief.
“It’s not him, Mom. It’s dementia.” She looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one. Surprisingly, that period passed, and she regained her proper place in his mind as his principal companion. She is the last tether. His secretary, his driver, his cook, who have all worked in the house for years, he recognizes as familiar and friendly people who make him feel safe, but he no longer knows their names. When my brother and I visit, he looks at us long and hard, with uninhibited curiosity. Our faces ring a distant bell, but he cannot make us out.
“Who are those people in the next room?” he asks a housekeeper.
“Your sons.”
“Really? Those men? Carajo. That’s incredible.”
There was an uglier period a couple of years earlier. My father was fully aware of his mind slipping away. He asked for help insistently, repeating time and time again that he was losing his memory. The toll of seeing a person in that state of anxiety and having to tolerate their endless repetitions over and over and over again is enormous. He would say, “I work with my memory. Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it. Help me,” and then he would repeat it in one form or another multiple times an hour for half an afternoon. It was grueling. That eventually passed. He regained some tranquility and would sometimes say, “I’m losing my memory, but fortunately I forget that I’m losing it,” or “Everyone treats me like I’m a child. It’s good that I like it.”
His secretary tells me that one afternoon she found him standing alone in the middle of the garden, looking off into the distance, lost in thought.
“What are you doing out here, Don Gabriel?”
“Crying.”
“Crying? You’re not crying.”
“Yes, I am. But without tears. Don’t you realize that my head is now shit?”
On another occasion, he said to her: “This isn’t my home. I want to go home. Home to my dad. I have a bed next to my dad’s.”
We suspect he was referring not to his father but to his grandfather, the colonel (and the inspiration for Colonel Aureliano Buendía), with whom he lived until he was eight. The colonel was the most influential man in his life. My father slept on a small mattress on the floor next to his bed. They never saw each other after 1935.
“That’s the thing about your father,” his secretary says to me. “Even ugly things he can talk about beautifully.”
Rodrigo García was born in Colombia, grew up in Mexico City, and studied history at Harvard University. His features as writer and director include Nine Lives, Albert Nobbs, and Last Days in the Desert. Garcia has directed for television series such as Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, and Big Love, for which he received an Emmy nomination. He also directed several episodes of HBO’s In Treatment, where, in addition to directing, he served as writer, executive producer, and series showrunner. Garcia currently resides in Los Angeles with his family.
Excerpted from A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha, by Rodrigo García.
Sunday, May 30, 2021
The last days of Gabriel García Márquez
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| Merces Barcha, Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez |
The last days of Gabriel García Márquez
The son of the author of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ has written an intimate portrait of his father’s struggle with memory loss, and the death of his mother Mercedes Barcha, who passed away last year
Camila Osorio
México, 28 May 2021
When Gabriel García Márquez was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude in the 1960s, he said one of the most difficult moments was when he got to the death of the memorable Colonel Aureliano Buendía. “Gabo,” as the Colombian author was popularly known, left the study of his home in Mexico City and went to find his wife, Mercedes Barcha, in the bedroom. “I killed the colonel,” he told her, heartbroken. “She knew what that meant for him and they remained silent with the sad news,” says García Márquez’s son, Rodrigo García, remembering his parents’ grief. Now it is Rodrigo who is writing about his own grief in a new book about the death of his parents, Gabo y Mercedes: una despedida (or, Gabo and Mercedes: a farewell).
A Letter to My Father, Gabriel García Márquez
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| Mercedes Barcha, Gabriel García Márquez, Gonzalo and Rodrigo. |
A Letter to My Father, Gabriel García Márquez
Not a day goes by that I don’t come across a reference to your novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It’s impossible not to speculate about what you would have made of all this.
Carta a mi padre, Gabriel García Márquez
Gabo,
April 17 was the sixth anniversary of your death, and the world has gone on largely as it always has, with human beings behaving with stunning and creative cruelty, sublime generosity and sacrifice, and everything in between.
Monday, May 10, 2021
Michael Jacobs's top 10 Colombian stories
Michael Jacobs's top 10 Colombian stories
The author recommends books to better understand a country whose traumatic history is balanced by life-affirming exuberance
Michael JacobsWed 5 Dec 2012 13.01 GMT
Alife-long passion for the Hispanic world first led me to Colombia, together with a fascination with the early explorers of the New World, from the conquistadors to the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The latter conveyed for me a sense of wonder and awe I would later find in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, whose novels encouraged my belief in travel literature as a poetic transformation of reality.
Friday, October 16, 2020
Carla Bruni's teenage obsessions: 'Francis Bacon shows our confusion, desire, madness'
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| Carla Bruni |
TEENAGE KICKS
Carla Bruni's teenage obsessions: 'Francis Bacon shows our confusion, desire, madness'
As she returns with a new album, the French chanteuse recalls the genius of the Clash and Henry James, plus encounters with Balearic naturists
Interview by Dave Simpson
Fri 16 Oct 2020 10.00 BST
The Clash
As a teenager in Paris all I wanted was travel, freedom and independence. I started working [in modelling] right after my high school exam and didn’t go to university because I wanted to be an adult. I was a bit of a rebel. For me, growing up was about discovering where the boundaries were and breaking them. Like the “terrible twos”, but in adolescence.
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Top 10 Latin American short stories
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| Jorge Luis Borges Illustration by Leib Chigrin |
Top 10 Latin American short stories
Its fiction is best known to English readers through novels, but its short stories are better. From Jorge Luis Borges to Clarice Lispector, here are some of the bestFernando Sdrigotti
Wed 22 April 2020
S
hort stories: how not to despair with the unjust way they are treated in the world of British letters? From their frequent definition in terms of what they are not – a novel – to the reluctance of risk-averse publishers when it comes to releasing one of these not-novels into the world. The latter tendency is falling out of fashion, thank God (thanks in large part to indie presses). But the hapless short-story book is still generally referred to as a “collection” in English. Call me picky, but this has always been a problematic word for me, because it masks the fact that this kind of book – if any good – is still a coherent conceptual unit: stories don’t grow spontaneously, like weed, so that writers can simply collect them. What’s wrong with calling a book of short stories “a book of short stories”?
Coming both literally and literarily from Latin America, these idiosyncrasies have always puzzled me. It is in the short story that our authors excel, and this is a hill I am willing to die on. The form is valued by readers, publishers and critics alike, cherished for its close connection to storytelling as oral tradition, and second to none in the region’s canon. And if I had to choose which books to preserve on a bookshelf of posterity I would salvage this unassuming genre and toss many an oversize novel, especially those written by otherwise excellent short-story writers.
JOLTS, my latest book of short stories, is styled in the Latin American tradition but written in English, a borrowed language – in this way I have managed to straddle both and neither worlds. This is a discomfort I cherish. This feeling of sitting somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, trying to force a dialogue between two totally different canons, and two different parts of myself, has been a constant source of inspiration. But there is always fear about what might get lost in translation. Although I have included many nods to my masters in the book, I suspect some of these could be hard to pin down for a British reader. So this is an attempt to pay explicit homage to some of the Latin American short story writers that influenced my own practice, together with others that have caught my attention in recent years. Hopefully this – incomplete – list might be a first step for any curious lover of short fiction.
Few stories better capture the power of writing than this one by Argentina’s most famous literary export. Imaginary lands and imaginary planets, forged volumes of the British Encyclopaedia and forged quotes – a Borgesian favourite – come together in this tale where fiction writes itself into reality; in which one can’t be told from the other.
2. The Llano in Flames by Juan Rulfo
Rulfo achieved world fame with his novel Pedro Páramo but his short stories are equally worthy of attention. The Llano in Flames, from the homonymous book perfectly embodies his style: economy of prose, sensorial images that in their attention to nature greatly capture the essence of rural Mexico, characters who seem to exist beyond life and death. Rulfo only published two books in his lifetime but his influence can still be felt.
A disturbing tale of perversion and revenge in which a child narrowly escapes abuse by pushing her attacker into a construction site hole. It might sound like a spoiler but this act of karmic justice is just the beginning. That this story explores adults’ capacity for wrong is clear from its opening paragraph. But are children also capable of evil? A dark but satisfying read by an Argentinian short story talent which deserves to be read more widely.
4. The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow by Gabriel García Márquez
Better known for his immortal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Colombian García Márquez was also the author of outstanding short stories. In this one, a wealthy couple on their honeymoon in Europe go through a dramatic, Kafkaesque ordeal, taking the reader on a suffocating journey. Legend has it Borges said that 50 years would have sufficed for One Hundred Years of Solitude, but not one word is a word too many in this magnificent story.
5. Perfumada Noche (Scented Night) by Haroldo Conti
A beautiful ode to life, love, and death in a small town in the Province of Buenos Aires. Unlike his novel Southeaster but along with much of his work, this story remains untranslated into English. Conti was disappeared by the Argentinian military junta in 1976. Before this tragic end he gifted us in Perfumada Noche one of the most evocative opening sentences ever written: “The life of a man is a miserable draft, a handful of sorrows that fit in just a few lines.”
6. The Fifth Story by Clarice Lispector
It is nothing short of miraculous that all of Lispector’s short fiction is available in English. Choosing a single story by one of Latin America’s finest writers is a cruel exercise but a great entry point to her work is The Fifth Story, from her book The Foreign Legion. All her most interesting traits are there: a certain linguistic strangeness, the subversion of domestic space, the sadistic brutality of everyday life, and the metafictional bent that would explode in her later works.
7. Letter to a Young Lady in Paris by Julio Cortázar
Reading Cortázar’s Bestiario as a teenager was my literary “listening to the Sex Pistols” moment. I devoured the book from cover to cover and ran to my mother’s Olivetti to start churning out my own short stories. Some of these early attempts still exist in my box of memories but needless to say none of them is as good as Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, from this extraordinary book. A flat swap starts to go wrong when our hero, who writes the missive of the title, starts vomiting bunnies that proceed to destroy the flat. Sounds strange? Welcome to Cortázar’s world.
8. Las amapolas también tienen espinas (Poppies Also Have Thorns) by Pedro Lemebel
Criminally underpublished in English, Lemebel, is one of Chile’s most singular voices. Gay, mestizo, working class and communist, it would be hard to find a more unlikely survivor of the Pinochet years. His crónicas of the Santiago of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, are brutal yet endearing documents of lives lived in the margins. In this story from his La esquina es mi corazón (The Corner is My Heart) Lemebel tells a tale of desire, class and violent homophobia. And he does so endearingly, honestly, and with characteristic dark humour. Lemebel as a transvestite flâneur is an exceptional guide to the Latin American city.
9. Sky and Poplars by Margarita García Robayo
Fish Soup by the Colombian García Robayo is a remarkable recent genre-bending effort, that brings together short stories and two novellas. A deadpan beat runs through the whole book – at times you find yourself giggling at things, only to question yourself a second later whether you should really be laughing about that. Sky and Poplars is in my opinion where she best displays her craft. In it, romantic and familial unspoken tragedies meet gentrification, to portray a suffocating world of angst and alienation.
10. Towards Happy Civilisation by Samanta Schweblin
In this story from the understated Mouthful of Birds we follow the misadventures of a city-dweller stuck in a provincial train station, trying to return to the capital. The apparently simple act of boarding a train is complicated here to an absurd degree. At times Beckettian riff, at times criticism of the state of the Argentinian railways post-neoliberalism, at times commentary on the civilisation v barbarism binary behind Argentinian identity, this is a story that will unsettle and amuse in equal measure.
THE GUARDIAN
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