About Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is a writer I greatly admire. Some call him a master of ‘magic realism’. Maybe what they mean is that there seems to be an ethereal quality to his writing , where the fantastic mingles with the absurd and produces an alchemic wonder.

But what differentiates him from others is the memorable characters , places and situations he creates. His masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude , was written while he lived in Mexico City. The Autumn of the Patriarch , a novel about the life of a Latin American dictator, and the best-seller Love in the Time of Cholera about an unrequited love , followed . In 1982 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.

Sadly all his original works are penned in Spanish and translated in English and other languages. I am sure the essence of his thoughts would have got significantly diluted and lost in translation.

I don’t know if some of you have noticed or not. The protagonists of his novels seem to hover around an age nearer to his own . As he has aged, so have his central characters. In the ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ , his evocative narration of the lives of the characters seems to stem from his own experience , though highly exaggerated . Maybe even great writers need some superficial experience about the characters and situations they so artfully depict. This brings me to the question. Can a writer truly create a story without any experience of his own?