Jahangir's World Times First Comprehensive Magazine for students/teachers of competitive exams and general readers as well.
The Most Towering Writer of Latin America
On 17 April 2014, Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, Latin America’s most popular novelist, passed away. He was not prolific’ he wrote just six full-length novels’ but in terms of world renown and sales Mr GarcÃa Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (1967) has eclipsed almost any other text translated from Spanish in the past 50 years. Colombia declared three days of mourning for him with flags flying at half-mast.
The Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez possessed a vivid imagination. His stories wove imaginary magical elements into real life and were often set in a fictional village called Macondo. Márquez was born Aracataca, a town in Colombia, on 6 March 1927. Shortly after his birth, his parents had to move away leaving Márquez in the care of his maternal grandparents.
Heavily influenced by the works of William Faulkner, Garcia Márquez wrote his first novel at the age of 23 although it took seven years to find a publisher. Published in 1955, ‘Leaf Storm’and his three subsequent novels received critical acclaim from the literary establishment.
In 1965, the idea for the first chapter of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ came to him while he was driving to Acapulco. He turned the car, drove home and locked himself into his room with six packets of cigarettes a day for company. He emerged 18 months later to find his family $12,000 in debt. Fortunately, he had thirteen hundred pages of phenomenal best-selling text in his hands.
The novel’s first printing in Spanish sold out within a week, and during the next thirty years ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ sold more than twenty million copies and was translated into more than thirty languages.
