Can someone provide a quick summary of what was it that made Marquez so prominent? I had not know much about him at all.
FYI, if like me, you have trouble accessing the article, and using Chrome, right-click and open in an incognito window.
FYI, if like me, you have trouble accessing the article, and using Chrome, right-click and open in an incognito window.
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.
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.
So. Politics.
I don't deny that the Nobel Prize can be political, but García Márquez was one of the most deserving recipients.
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."
The publication of The Garden of Forking Paths predates Hugh Everett's PhD on the "Many Worlds" interpretation by 15 years.
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."
In other news, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome is a thing.
"where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment" [0]
He got most of his fame from "One hundred years of solitude".
* A builder of great narratives. His best books typically go through several little stories with a common unifying theme.
* A sharp builder of catchy phrases. This works much better in Spanish, he was a master of rhythm, but you can get in English too.
* A builder of great images. It is impossible to make a decent movie of the scenes he describes. It would be like dissecting an hummingbird.
“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.”
Fermina Daza: "No. Forget it."
He opened the flood gates of saccharine magic realism which haunts Latin America literature to this day.
Magical realism in general and Garcia Marquez in particular are more critically problematic than many realize.
I don't think this thread should gloss over that entirely, even if the tone of objection is unlovely.