He is was a tireless advocate in defense of human rights, which occasionally has earned him abundant criticism, and a passionate supporter of the Caribbean culture. He considered himself a politician by necessity, a consequence of his irrepressible passion for life. It is for this reason that his books are addressed to two kinds of readers, that of his small group of friends capable of capturing the winks and complicities of his novels, and the general public. 

Well known for the inclusion of magic in his novels, he asserts however that the best literary formula to write a novel is always to tell the truth. His characters are built by a combination of traits assembled like puzzle pieces from different people he knew in real life, including the author himself. Working in this manner, the starting point of his books is always a visual image, where the imagination is a creative instrument, but the source is always life itself, the novel becoming a poetic representation of reality. 

García Márquez tells stories and relates events to understand the essence of what is related, utilizing in a revolutionary way technical elements of style, such as time, structure, tone, and language. Often the author resorts to the use of anachronisms, anticipations of snippets of stories, and comparisons between characters to make the reader remember other episodes. 

His immeasurable ability to relate the real-marvelous, what has been called "magical realism" is perhaps his most outstanding characteristic. The writer mixes the normal and daily with the supernatural, making the reader forget the border between the two planes. It is that telling of the most atrocious happenings without being emotionally moved that produces a magical effect on the reader, the sensation of vertigo and disorientation between reality and fiction.

Cien años de soledad

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba

El general en su laberinto

El amor en los tiempos del cólera

Del amor y otros demonios

One Hundred Years of Solitude recounts a century in the life of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictional town of Macondo, in Colombia.

Narrative

The Latin American boom is a literary phenomenon that emerged in the 1960s when a prodigious renewal of the Latin American narrative took place. Readers from all over the world discovered authors as representative today as Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Borges, Fuentes, Donoso, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez. The works of these writers are characterized by a great thematic variety, with a preference for the urban novel (Cortázar, Fuentes) and a renewed treatment of the rural (Rulfo, García Márquez). 

Defining feature is the masterful fusion of the fantastic and the real, what is known as 'magical realism', the most representative example of which is García Márquez's extensive novel Cien años de soledad. These authors produce a total renovation of the structure of the story, often breaking the plotline, with habitual changes from the perspective of the narrator and jumps in the time during the action. The experimentation is so extraordinary that it ends up affecting the language itself, overlapping styles and registers and often distorting the syntax and lexicon, many of the authors of this time becoming icons of the history of literature.

Latinoamerican Literature

García Márquez writes Cien años de soledad, novel that recounts a century in the life of the Buendía family, today it is still considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature and one of the classic examples of magical realism.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes La ciudad y los perros, novel about the one related to the violent experiences of the interned cadets of the last three years of Secondary Education of the Leoncio Prado Military School in the capital of Peru.

Julio Cortazar writes Rayuela, a novel whose story puts the reader's subjectivity at stake and has multiple endings.

Carlos Fuentes writes La muerte de Artemio Cruz,  a milestone in the Latin American Boom.

María Luisa Bombal writes La amortajada,  novel that reflects the social conditions of the 1930s in Chile.

Spanish Bites

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Cien años de soledad (1967)

By Gabriel García Márquez

Time Period: Latinoamerican Literature

Genre: Narrative

Spanish Bites

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