A MASTER OF magic realism, the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) weaves history and fantasy together to create surreal fictions and enchanted Latin American landscapes. Cien años de soledad (1967; English trans., One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) follows the century-long epic of the Buendía family, from their founding of the town of Macondo in the jungle to their apocalyptic end, foretold in a gypsy’s history book. Alongside plagues of insomnia and amnesia, a four-year-long rainstorm, and a realization that time flows in circles, García Márquez parallels real-life events in this fiction: contact with other villages leads to civil war, a railroad carries gringos who start a company town, and the army massacres striking banana workers. García Márquez explained that this mix of mythical and historical storytelling “was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories,” saying fantastic things as if they were perfectly normal.
1. Which Latin American political figure is the subject of García Márquez’s novel The General in His Labyrinth?
2. In his acceptance speech for the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, which former Nobel laureate did García Márquez call “my master”?
3. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, what resource does García Márquez’s fictional dictator sell to the United States?
4. In a failed 2006 referendum, what did the mayor of Aracataca, Colombia, suggest renaming the town, which is García Márquez’s birthplace?
5. What influential European author did García Márquez compare to his grandmother, for saying “the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice”?
ANSWERS
1. Simón Bolívar.
2. William Faulkner.
3. The sea.
4. Aracataca-Macondo.
5. Franz Kafka.