Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans in disarray!

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Let there be snark.

The willow is too close to the house.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Let’s finish the job.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

This really is a full service blog.

You are here: Home / Books / Gabriel Garcia Marquez RIP

Reader Interactions

65Comments

  1. 1.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    RIP. I believe that I’ve read every word of his that made it into English translation. The last line of his short story, “No One Writes to the Colonel” is priceless. That story is available HERE as a .pdf.

  2. 2.

    Archon

    100 years of solitude is probably my favorite book of all time. Chronicle of a death foretold is also a masterpiece.

    RIP

  3. 3.

    Cronin

    Awful, but not surprising, given his age. Always loved his work.

    If you ever have the chance, I’d recommend…everything of his before Love in the Time of Cholera. Not the most popular opinion, but I think that’s actually one of his less-good novels.

  4. 4.

    Archon

    100 years of solitude is probably my favorite book of all time. Chronicle of a death foretold is also a masterpiece.

    RIP

  5. 5.

    Tommy

    OMG> That is a very sad thing. I own all his books. I wish I could pull and post the first page of a Hundred Years of Solitude, cause it is the best first page of any book I’ve read. That is saying a lot. It might get better from there.

  6. 6.

    Elizabelle

    Not surprised. He had dementia, too.

    But what a wonderful writer and journalist. He was writing until fairly recently. RIPeace.

  8. 8.

    JPL

    How sad. Love in the time of Cholera was a favorite but right now I feel like I need One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  9. 9.

    Betty Cracker

    Damn. The mister and I first became interested in each other when we struck up a conversation as the only two people in a noisy little neighborhood pub who were reading. He was reading “100 Years of Solitude,” and I was reading “Crime and Punishment.” We agreed to switch books and discuss them at our next meeting, and our romance bloomed under the jaundiced eye of Colonel Aureliano Buendia and the hectic gaze of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. RIP, Gabriel García Márquez.

  10. 10.

    Jennifer

    @Tommy: Wow. I always thought the last page, particularly the last line, was the stunner:

    Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliana Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

  11. 11.

    Elizabelle

    The LATimes has a nice writeup; more formal obit to come.

    Garcia Marquez’s death represents the passing of one of the world’s greatest living authors, and the loss of a powerful public intellectual whose opinions on Cuba, military dictatorship and Latin American cultural autonomy made front-page news.

    The news was met with an outpouring of grief and reverence for the writer known to his admirers simply as “Gabo,” and who was often compared to Hispanic literature’s other titan, “Don Quixote” author Miguel de Cervantes. More than any other author, Garcia Marquez fueled the post-World War II popularizing of Latin America literature known as the “Boom.”

    “Being a contemporary of Gabo was like living in the time of Homer,” said Colombian writer Hector Abad Faciolince, who described “One Hundred Years” as Latin America’s first and only epic work of literature.”In a mythic and poetic way, he explained our origins. His verbal imagination and creative force were astonishing.”

    …. Success came late to Garcia Marquez, his blockbuster 1967 novel published shortly before he turned 40. Until then he had scraped by as a newspaper reporter, advertising copywriter and screenwriter. He was so poor when he finished his big novel that he had to mail the manuscript to his Argentine publisher in two packages because he couldn’t afford to send it all at once.

    But the subsequent growth of his global fame and influence leading up to and following his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature was a phenomenon unsurpassed over the last century by any writer with the possible exception of Ernest Hemingway.

  12. 12.

    Tommy

    I have some of his short stories in my bathroom. You know when ….

    My favorite author of all-time.

  13. 13.

    the Conster

    Isn’t there a commenter here with the nym Jose Arcadio Buendia? Best.story.ever. There are images from that book that will be with me until I ascend.

  14. 14.

    beltane

    You haven’t read any of his books? This must be remedied at once. Go and read One Hundred Years of Solitude ASAP. One of my top 5 favorite books. Many of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short stories are also excellent.

  15. 15.

    Sad_Dem

    One Hundred Years of Solitude is a timeless novel. I heard that when he was a journalist working in Mexico City in 1965, he packed his family in a car to drive to Acapulco for a vacation. On the way, he got the idea for the novel–it would be in the voice of his grandmother, who related the most fantastic and improbably stories as if they were everyday things. He turned the car around and holed up for the next year and half to write the book.

  16. 16.

    Tommy

    @Jennifer: I didn’t have to go far to find the opening line.

    Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

  18. 18.

    Betty Cracker

    @Jennifer: As the ants carry the baby off…absolutely haunting and profound. I agree with Tommy about the opening of the novel, though — I don’t have it in front of me, but it started off with something like, “As he faced the firing squad….” I mean, how on earth could you NOT keep reading?

  20. 20.

    dollared

    RIP. I have so many more to read, but I finished The General in his Labyrinth about a month ago. Such an amazing, brilliant man, and his public life was something to admire.

  22. 22.

    BGinCHI

    @Betty Cracker: Great story. 100 Years is so epic.

    Let’s also not forget the great story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”

    First line:

    On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench.

  23. 23.

    JPL

    Since I’m close to medicare age, this quote seems appropriate, The secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude

  24. 24.

    Honus

    La Cien Anos de Soledad. I love the passage where the people were fascinated and amazed by ice and ignored the flying carpet because it was old hat.

  25. 25.

    Tommy

    @BGinCHI: I’ve said this once I will say it again.

    I have books of his short stories in my bathroom. He is my favorite author. When my parents went there I asked him to buy his books for me. In a language I can’t read much less speak, just because.

  26. 26.

    aimai

    @Betty Cracker: Thats a beautiful story, Betty. Thanks for sharing it. Mr. Aimai and I share a lot aesthetically, historically, culturally, and emotionally but our background in books is not one of those things. What fun to have that as the tie that binds.

  27. 27.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    Way back in my college days, one of my Lit. professors had us read a book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. He quickly became one of my favorite authors. What a joy it was, years later, to read Marquez and to see how much he had done with the style of which Borges was a predecessor.

  28. 28.

    MattF

    I remember back in grad school I mentioned to a specialist in Latin American literature that I’d read ‘100 Years of Solitude’. She wasn’t impressed. “Well,” she said, “you know, it is the greatest and most famous novel ever written.” And yes, you should read it.

  29. 29.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @MattF:

    And yes, you should read it.

    In a long life of reading there have been three books that, when I looked up from them, had caused me to see the world with different eyes. 100 Years of Solitude is one of them.

  30. 30.

    Jennifer

    FWIW, I stumbled across a book years ago and bought it because of Garcia Marquez’ comment about it: “Finally, this is the novel I always wanted to read.” And I agreed – if you’re a fan of Marquez, you’ll love Santa Evita (Tomas Eloy Martinez). It owes a big debt to Marquez.

  32. 32.

    Jennifer

    @Betty Cracker: I’m not taking anything away from the opening line, but I still think it’s the last one that was Nobel-worthy. I found the novel a hard slog the first time I read it because of the cycles of repetition and the re-use of names through the generations & etc. Of course I was in my twenties then; back then I didn’t have the patience for Faulkner. But I settle on the last line because it’s the one that gives meaning to everything that has come before it in the novel.

  34. 34.

    Elizabelle

    Instead of reading books about aggravating Republicans and the trouble they bring, why don’t we do a GGM tribute book party with 100 Years of Solitude?

    It would be a pleasure to read it (again or for the first time).

    May we?

  37. 37.

    Betty Cracker

    @aimai: We sort of knew each other already because we had mutual friends and lived on the same little island, but the books got us talking.

    It’s a good thing too, because before that, he thought I was gay, LOL! Total misunderstanding — my sister, who IS gay — and I went to a party, and all he heard about us before he met us was that we were sisters and one of us was gay. I’m definitely more of a hippie type, whereas my sister is stylish and put together. So it was an honest mistake. ;-)

    @Jennifer: Added to my list, thanks! And I agree about that last line — I’ll never forget reading it for the first time and being utterly blown away by it.

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate: The thing that gets me about “Gravity’s Rainbow” is how funny it is in some places (the old ladies with their horrible chocolates, for example). I didn’t expect that.

  38. 38.

    MariedeGournay

    Delurking just to say that to this day the ascension into heaven of Remedios the Beauty is my favorite moment in any novel. So simple, funny and brilliant.

  41. 41.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @Betty Cracker:

    “You’ve taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!” cries Mrs. Quoad, having now with conjuror’s speed produced an egg-shaped confection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils. “Just for that I shan’t let you have any of these marvelous rhubarb creams.” Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.

  45. 45.

    ItAintEazy

    I wonder if it says something about me if the only book I read of his was “Memories of My Melancholy Whores.”

  46. 46.

    Origuy

    Unfortunately, it looks like the only Kindle editions of his works are the Spanish editions. No puedo leer lo bastante bien para comprender.

  47. 47.

    Miki

    @Betty Cracker: I’m convinced the 2d-Ex (RIP) stuck around as long as he did in part because he wasn’t comfortable rejecting the WOman who’d turned him on to 100 Years of Solitude, among other great works. That and some other stuff, like a fishing buddy. And sex – the sex was good until it wasn’t.

  48. 48.

    Valdivia

    Love in The Time of the Cholera, A hundred years of Solitude and No one writes to the Colonel just a few of his great writings. A life full great and beautiful words.

  49. 49.

    Gin & Tonic

    Probably outing myself as some sort of Philistine, but twice I’ve started to read 100 Years — because everyone says it’s so great — and I just couldn’t get the momentum going. I’ve read lots of books over the years, and I know I should read this one, but … magical realism just doesn’t work for me.

  55. 55.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @eemom:

    That news makes me very happy. Not quite sure why; I’m usually pretty meh about babies. But somehow, the idea of Bill and Hillary being grandparents just fills me with delight. All good wishes to Chelsea.

    P.S. Edit: I’m still having to enter my nym and email address every time I comment. What a pain in the ass. Is there some way to fix this annoyance?

    #yeahiknowfirstworldproblems #stillagiantpain

  56. 56.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    @Gin & Tonic: I’m exactly the same way – and can’t tolerate magical realism in general. Nonetheless, I’m sorry to hear of the passing of a writer who brought delight and insight to others, even if not to me.

  57. 57.

    JustRuss

    @Gin & Tonic: I read it in college, which was….quite a long time ago, and found it a hard slog. Might give it another shot. I hated Heart of Darkness in college, loved it on the second read.

  58. 58.

    Ernest Pikeman

    I wish I could read him in Spanish. I’ve read most of his work in two translated languages.

    Other than 100 Years, Rushdie’s Midnight Children really blew the top of my head off when I first read it. Grass’ The Flounder comes close. Still haven’t gotten into Pynchon, maybe it’s time.

  59. 59.

    Gin & Tonic

    @JustRuss: I’m not averse to hard slogs. I’ve read Gaddis and Pynchon. Marquez and Rushdie just didn’t click for me.

  60. 60.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Ernest Pikeman: Still haven’t gotten into Pynchon, maybe it’s time.

    My recommendation is to start with V. If that doesn’t work for you, I don’t think anything else will.

  62. 62.

    Hawes

    Love in the Time of Cholera is my favorite novel.

    But I don’t find this sad. David Foster Wallace was sad. I imagine Gabo being lifted off to paradise by a flock of yellow butterflies.

  63. 63.

    Biscuits

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Me too! Picked it up because it was recommended to me by someone who’s opinion I respect. I just could not get into it. I found it overbearing and melodramatic. Maybe I should try again.

  64. 64.

    lahke

    I first read 100 Years in Spanish when I was an exchange student in Colombia in 1969, and then had to share it around to all my friends because their parents had banned it (oooh, sex!). Everyone insisted that everything in the book had really happened: the episode of the massacre of the striking workers was based on the Bull Ring Massacre, etc. So the trappings might have been magic, but there was a lot of reality it was based on.

  65. 65.

    Bunji

    100 years of solitude has been over and over and over, listed at the top of the best novels by so many serious readers. No excuse, read it. And weep with joy and sadness and every other human emotion.

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