{"id":12664,"date":"2016-10-19T09:00:56","date_gmt":"2016-10-19T16:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=12664"},"modified":"2016-10-18T10:05:26","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T17:05:26","slug":"lit-matters-the-magic-reality-of-gabriel-garcia-marquez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2016\/10\/19\/lit-matters-the-magic-reality-of-gabriel-garcia-marquez\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Matters<\/em>: The magic reality of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cA novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it,\u201d said Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, a Latin American novelist and journalist best known for his sweeping novel One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/i>.<\/p>\n

M\u00e1rquez grew up in Colombia and began his literary career as a journalist. But when the government was replaced by a military dictatorship in 1953, a story about army negligence earned him an unofficial exile from the country. He spent many years scraping together a living as a foreign correspondent before sitting down one day to write the opening sentence of his first novel: \u201cMany years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buend\u00eda was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took M\u00e1rquez 18 months of full-time writing to complete One Hundred Years<\/i>, and during that time his wife had to pawn household items and beg for food. Fortunately, the novel was wildly successful, securing his place as a titan of world literature and winning him the Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n

M\u00e1rquez is famous for writing \u201cmagic realism,\u201d in which the ordinary world is invaded by extraordinary occurrences presented matter-of-factly to the reader. In his short story \u201cA Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,\u201d an old couple catches a bedraggled angel in their backyard and keeps him in the chicken coop for passers-by to ogle.<\/p>\n

What makes his work so moving is that despite all the fantastic happenings\u2014plagues of insomnia, levitating priests, ghost ships in the middle of the jungle\u2014his world is a familiar world in which we can recognize ourselves. The greed of the old couple and the meanness of the neighbours poking at the angel is our greed and our meanness. And the beauty and the love that carry his characters through One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/i> are our beauty and our love, too.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez must-read:
\n<\/b>One Hundred Years of Solitude
\n<\/i>(Interurban Library code:\u00a0PQ 8180.17 A73 C513)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it,\u201d said Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, a Latin American novelist and journalist best known for his sweeping novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. M\u00e1rquez grew up in Colombia and began his literary career as a journalist. But when the government was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12665,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-october-19-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12666,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12664\/revisions\/12666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}