WORK OF GARCIA MARQUEZ

Work of Garcia Marquez

Work of Garcia Marquez

Introduction

García Márquez's literary development occurred concurrently with his career as a journalist. In 1954, he returned to Bogotá, where he worked for El Espectador and wrote short stories in his spare time. One of them, “Un día después del sábado” (“One Day After Saturday”), won for García Márquez a competition sponsored by the Association of Artists and Writers of Bogotá. In 1955, his first novel was published. La hojarasca (1955; Leaf Storm and Other Stories, 1972) presents life in the fictional town of Macondo from 1900 to 1930 and is generally considered to be his most Faulknerian novel.

Discussion

García Márquez also wrote his short fiction Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (1967; Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo, 1972) during this time as well as a true account of the shipwreck of a Colombian naval destroyer, which El Espectador published in fourteen installments without attribution. This story included material about illegal government activity and caused much controversy.

Consequently, the editor of El Espectador thought it wise to send García Márquez abroad to Geneva, where he worked as a foreign correspondent and also studied filmwriting and directing. When the Colombian government eventually closed down El Espectador because of the shipwreck story, García Márquez stayed on in Europe, moving to Paris for several years of writing—and literally starving—in a garret. There, he wrote two political novels: La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour, 1979) received the Colombian Esso Literary Prize in 1961, and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, 1968) has been highly praised for its precise style and psychological insights. Although García Márquez's fiction did not attract significant attention outside literary circles until the publication of his masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), those who did know him recognized an extraordinary talent.

In 1958, García Márquez returned to Venezuela to work for the newspaper Momento in Caracas and, in that same year, married Mercedes Barcha. Over the next several years, García Márquez wrote most of the stories published as Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (1962). Until this point, except for Leaf Storm, García Márquez's style had been Hemingway-like, appropriate for conveying the political turmoil which was then a characteristic theme in his work, but the title story in Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, which was allegorical and relied heavily on hyperbole, reflected a significant departure. The years 1959-1965 were a period of crisis for García Márquez. Caught between his former sparse style and a burgeoning mythical approach rich in language and imagery, García Márquez wrote no fiction and focused, instead, on journalism.

Like most Latin American intellectuals, he supported the Cuban Revolution. In 1959, García Márquez opened the Bogotá office of Fidel Castro's Cuban news agency Prensa Latina and went to open its New York bureau in 1961, but stayed only a short time. Leaving New York City on a Greyhound bus, he ...