Remembering Gabriel García Márquez

Myth brims with stories of the brave and talented being raised up to the heavens to shine as stars after death. Gabriel García Márquez was one of the rare few who attained the sky even before his time had come, illuminating a new genre for countless readers the world over. For many, García Márquez's work was the first glimpse at a new literary landscape, one that shone as much with darkness as it did with light. Known for using illusion and fantasy to highlight the tumult of life in South America, García Márquez's prose magnifies personal struggle to capture the spirit of upheaval and revolution. Though his imagery has been described as transcendent and his prose inspired, it is the emotion engendered by García Márquez's work that remains with the reader.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez creates a world that is as pliable as soft clay, but nonetheless inescapable to the characters trapped within. A beautifully wrought allegory of the cycles of crisis that plagued South America, One Hundred Years of Solitude takes a story of nations and brings that drama down to a human level. A novel that succeeds on imagery and metaphor, the text only deepens with knowledge of South American history and politics.

García Márquez would go on to expand on these themes of crisis, violence, and inevitability in The Autumn of the Patriarch, a more direct look at the construction and dehumanizing effects of dictatorship. While the titular patriarch seems to persist forever, his existence is as claustrophobic as the breathlessly text-packed pages his story unfolds on.