Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bio

• b . March 6, 1928• Aracataca, Northern Colombia

Raised by maternal grandparents

Colombia

Influences

• Grandmother: "The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred

Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness.... What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories and everyone was surprised.”

• Faulkner--relevance of place: Yoknapatawpha = Macondo

Kafka--write anything, any way.

Magical Realism

• ”These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales.” M. H. Abrams

• Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia

• Milan Kundera, Czech

• Salman Rushdie, UK/India

• Laura Esquivel, Mexico Como Agua Para Chocolate

Strange Pilgrims

• Short Stories written from 78-82• Gabo in his 50s

12 short stories meant to be read as a whole

Hermeneutic Circle

• One cannot understand the whole without understanding the parts

One cannot understand the parts without understanding the whole