Gabriel Garcia Márquez
I heard the news from a friend who casually pinged me on Facebook this afternoon. "Gabriel Garcia Márquez is dead" the message read. And so he was. He died yesterday at the age of 87.
The first memory I have of Márquez is the collection of books which bore that name on my mother's bookshelf. As a child I thought 'Gabriel' was a woman's name and simply assumed the author was a 'she'.
When I was in the seventh grade however, I found a short story collection by the author in the senior school library. I started reading the first story in the collection "Eva Is Inside Her Cat". I will not pretend I understood anything the author tried to say, but the macabre style of writing drew me. I did not read Márquez in the three years that followed but the memory of the glimpse of macabre I had experienced that afternoon remained my library secret for a long time.
The first proper novel I read by the author was "No One Writes To The Colonel". It was a 17th birthday gift from a friend. The novel was a short one and I a fast reader. I finished the novel in less than an hour and the only emotion I felt at the conclusion was a sense of depression and an absolute sort of hopelessness.
My mother insisted that Márquez was one of the best authors she had read and encouraged me to try some of his more popular works. Consequently I read "A Hundred Years of Solitude", "Chronicles of a Death Foretold", "Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" and "Love in the Time of Cholera". I think I understood the author's style of writing a little more and came to appreciate it even. I never did like the books though. He was undisputedly a great author but his constant obsession with isolation and melancholia was sometime a bit too difficult to overlook.
Though I was never his biggest fan, his death saddens me immensely. His legacy however will carry on forever. Rest in peace Mr Márquez.
The first memory I have of Márquez is the collection of books which bore that name on my mother's bookshelf. As a child I thought 'Gabriel' was a woman's name and simply assumed the author was a 'she'.
When I was in the seventh grade however, I found a short story collection by the author in the senior school library. I started reading the first story in the collection "Eva Is Inside Her Cat". I will not pretend I understood anything the author tried to say, but the macabre style of writing drew me. I did not read Márquez in the three years that followed but the memory of the glimpse of macabre I had experienced that afternoon remained my library secret for a long time.
The first proper novel I read by the author was "No One Writes To The Colonel". It was a 17th birthday gift from a friend. The novel was a short one and I a fast reader. I finished the novel in less than an hour and the only emotion I felt at the conclusion was a sense of depression and an absolute sort of hopelessness.
My mother insisted that Márquez was one of the best authors she had read and encouraged me to try some of his more popular works. Consequently I read "A Hundred Years of Solitude", "Chronicles of a Death Foretold", "Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" and "Love in the Time of Cholera". I think I understood the author's style of writing a little more and came to appreciate it even. I never did like the books though. He was undisputedly a great author but his constant obsession with isolation and melancholia was sometime a bit too difficult to overlook.
Though I was never his biggest fan, his death saddens me immensely. His legacy however will carry on forever. Rest in peace Mr Márquez.
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