Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian Nobel laureate whose novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera defined magical realism and transformed world literature.

Gabriel García Márquez is the writer most responsible for establishing magical realism as a recognised literary mode. One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, traces seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo — a history that encompasses civil wars, banana company imperialism, and supernatural phenomena that the novel’s characters accept with the same equanimity they apply to ordinary events. The prose, in Gregory Rabassa’s English translation, is luminous, and the novel’s capacity to hold the political and the mythological in simultaneous focus is extraordinary.

Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, works on a smaller scale — a love story that unfolds over more than fifty years, beginning in unrequited adolescence and returning, improbably, in old age. The novel’s argument — that love is less a feeling than a commitment, and that it can survive virtually everything including time — is made with such sensuousness and patience that it becomes genuinely moving. García Márquez’s prose style, unhurried and precise, is at its most accessible here.

Some readers find the scale and circularity of One Hundred Years of Solitude overwhelming rather than epic, and García Márquez has been criticised for the way women function in his fiction — often as symbols or catalysts rather than fully independent agents. But as a writer of sentences, of place, and of the relationship between history and myth, he has few equals in 20th-century literature.