• Gabriel Garcia Marquez dead at 87
    7 replies, posted
[quote]Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality, died at home in Mexico City around midday, according to people close to his family. He was 87. Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works – among them Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Autumn of the Patriarch – outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages. His stories made him literature's best-known practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a boy born with a pig's tail and a man trailed by a swarm of yellow butterflies. One Hundred Years of Solitude was "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure," biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press. When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable." His death was confirmed by two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family's privacy.[/quote] [Source: [url=http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20807932,00.html?xid=rss-fullcontent]PEOPLE.com[/url] via AP] A huge shame, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favourite books, uniquely immersive and beautifully written.
From back when getting the Nobel prize [i]meant[/i] something.
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude earlier this year. Some really creative stuff, makes me wish magical realism was a more prominent genre, both in literature and cinema.
[QUOTE=Yogkog;44578791]I read One Hundred Years of Solitude earlier this year. Some really creative stuff, makes me wish magical realism was a more prominent genre, both in literature and cinema.[/QUOTE] that fucking ending though...
[QUOTE=Robman8908;44577309]From back when getting the Nobel prize [i]meant[/i] something.[/QUOTE] It doesn't mean anything now?
[QUOTE=Swebonny;44578982]It doesn't mean anything now?[/QUOTE] I think he's referring back to when Obama got a Nobel peace prize for doing absolutely jack shit.
[QUOTE=Robman8908;44577309]From back when getting the Nobel prize [i]meant[/i] something.[/QUOTE] Peace prizes are worth jack shit. The other subjects are worth something.
[QUOTE=Robman8908;44577309]From back when getting the Nobel prize [I]meant[/I] something.[/QUOTE] I assume you're just dissing the Peace Prize (which it still dumb)? Edit: And his prize was in Literature anyway, so your post is silly. I don't think anyone thinks less of Nobel Prizes in Literature today.
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