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| Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) |
Generally speaking Nobel Prize
for Literature is granted to three kinds of writers – the first is the category
of writers who have earned global fame for their creation, and the Nobel recognition
serves as an ultimate endorsement of their creative genius. Alice Munro and Vidya
Naipaul belongs to this category.
Then there are writers who are
known only to a select few connoisseurs of literature, and the Nobel momentarily
widens their appeal, but then they revert to obscurity – Tomas Transtomer, the
Swedish poet who won the Nobel in 2011, and Rabindranath Tagore who won it in
1913, are in this category. They remain largely unknown outside their
own cultures, and ignored within. I’d say a majority of Nobel Prize winners belong to this
category.
The third category is of writers
who attain global fame because of Nobel Prize, and enrich the lives of millions
of readers in different parts of the world with their creation. Gabriel Garcia Marquez belongs
to this category.
His Nobel in 1982 introduced the world to magic realism and the
power of Spanish literature – the Latin American boom that included besides the Colombian Marquez, Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Julio Cortazar, and Mexico’s
Carlos Fuentes. All four deserved the
Nobel, only Marquez and Llosa actually won it.
For readers of a certain age,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez epitomizes everything that is truly exquisite in literature.
Almost everyone who’s over 40-years-old and reads books would have read One
Hundred Years of Solitude sometime in the early 1980s.
Many of us who read it with great
enthusiasm didn’t actually get it. All that we liked about it was its
similarity to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – the same sweeping canvas,
the multiplicity of characters, the amazing twists and turns in the story, and ghosts thrown in for good measure.
It was only many years later upon
reading it the second time, and knowing a bit more of the region’s tortured
history did the magnificence and the depth of Marquez’s masterpiece really
begin to sink in, and yet it wasn’t as if we completely understood everything
we read.
However, by then (in the
mid-1990s) Marquez’s significance was known to all – One Hundred Years was
considered one of the most important pieces of literature of the last century,
with Pablo Neruda (another iconic Latin American litterateur with a huge fan
following in India) proclaiming that One Hundred Years was “the greatest
revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes.”
I'm well and truly old. Whenever someone who was integral to my youth dies, I'm reminded of Pink Floyd's line from the masterpiece Time: Shorter of breath, one day closer to death...
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