His best known work is "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which sold 20 million copies.
Or, as the OP describes it:
> The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
It's an excellent book, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. That said, I'm kind of surprised (but pleased) to see that his passing was noted by HN readers.
"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) is a beautiful piece of fiction, and hugely influential. When I first read it, suddenly a number of other books and films seemed to spring from this single point of inspiration.
I think he was, in no small part, popular for the same reason that Sean Penn got his second Oscar for Milk: politics.
Marquez thumbed the eye of colonialism. And he wrote a bunch of rolling sentences with colourful imagery. But I don't see why he deserves the Nobel Prize over, to take a glaring example, Borges.
Except that Borges didn't really write anything politically fashionable, as opposed to possessing any other literary virtue.
This is not a comment on Marquez, who probably deserved his Nobel, but: everyone knows that the literature Prize is thoroughly politicized, perhaps as much as that supreme expression of European political sentiment, the Nobel Peace Prize. Just reflect for a moment how it is that the writer of English sometimes described as the most important since Shakespeare never won: Nabokov's unwavering opposition to Communist tyranny and disdain for literature as a vehicle for political propaganda disqualified him.
This is utter nonsense. García Márquez wrote some of the most compelling and beautiful stories of the 20th century. Borges wrote the literary equivalent of late night stoner conversations, covering up a lack of substance with erudition.
I don't deny that the Nobel Prize can be political, but García Márquez was one of the most deserving recipients.
I was considering phrasing my comment as "conversations between stoned philosophy students", so yes, that sounds about right.
Not to mention the fact that a philosophy course about Borges will likely be examining the work of the philosophers Borges was referencing. I've yet to see anyone make the claim that Borges originated any of the important philosophical ideas in his stories.
Edit: Just to back this up a little more, here is a quote from the man himself: "But I wonder if they are my ideas. Because really I am not a thinker. I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don’t think that I’m a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps."
I've yet to see anyone make the claim that Borges originated any of the important philosophical ideas in his stories.
The idea of text as a finite construct struck me as original when I first encountered it in The Library of Babel. Are there any earlier sources that I should be aware of?
As someone who's interested in interactive fiction, I found a lot of prescient thinking in Borges. His work becomes more relevant over time, even as it posits its own eventual redundancy. I'm not sure anyone can say that about García Márquez. But like others are saying, there is no need to take away respect from one of these authors to pay it to the other.
Edit: Just to back this up a little more, here is a quote from the man himself: "But I wonder if they are my ideas. Because really I am not a thinker. I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don’t think that I’m a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps."
“By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies, and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was looking for, and he was glad to know it. "Bravo, lionlady," he said when he left. "We have killed the tiger.”
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
“He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.”
“[The captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love and was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.”
Agree that this thread should not gloss over the gigabytes of rubbish written by undergrads in response to "magical realism", and what's worse, the person-years wasted by a devotion to the arts inspired by a combination of a childish attraction to this sort of stuff and the spurious academic credentials accorded to it.
FYI, if like me, you have trouble accessing the article, and using Chrome, right-click and open in an incognito window.