Books
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Most Life-Changing Works
Every reader has a Gabriel García Márquez story. I'd like to think mine began long before I was born, when my father won a small edition of Cien años de soledade during a college speech competition. He's carried it with him ever since, and though I could never quite read the dense Spanish type, we lived together, that book and I, for my entire childhood. Decades after my father met Márquez, a boy gave me the English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude during one of those sad, endless college summers. I always trick myself into thinking that the boy wrote something inside the book's front cover, but whenever I go back to check, there's no inscription there. That's the effect Márquez has on me, though. When I read him, love hovers on the page like a mirage.
I asked some of my favorite authors and literary figures to name their favorite Márquez work, and not surprisingly, almost everyone remembered a line, a mood, a moment. That's the effect Márquez has on people, I guess. You never forget a writer like that.
Ronald Spatz, Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of 'Alaska Quarterly Review'
“Exhilarating beauty and narrative power are everywhere in the works of Gabriel García Márquez. But for me the depiction of memory and the illusory nature of life in One Hundred Years of Solitude were transformative when I first read the book 40 years ago and have continued to deeply resonate for me ever since.”
Karla Zabludovsky, Latin American Correspondent for 'Newsweek'
“My favorite piece of his is Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. It is more journalism than novel, more realism than magic, García Márquez at his rawest. I must’ve read it when I was 12 or so, but to this day, I can’t help thinking of the ever-so-punctual sharks whenever I look down at my watch and it strikes five o’clock.”
Adrian Matejka, author of 'The Big Smoke,' Finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
“It’s hard to pinpoint which work by Gabriel García Márquez had the most influence on me as a reader and writer, but I can definitively say One Hundred Years of Solitude had the most profound impact on me physically. As I was reading the book for the first time, I developed insomnia — as did my roommate who had read the book before me — and we were convinced we had the insomnia plague. We labeled things around the apartment with Post-It notes — coffee, beer, mustard, phone — for a week before giving in and sleeping for about three days straight.”
Laurie Ann Guerrero, San Antonio Poet Laureate, author of 'A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying'
“I’ll never forget when I first read, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez’s description of a stream of blood that left a man’s body in search of his mother: ‘A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.’
This sentence at once made me want to speed through to get to the destination and slow down to savor each particular world every comma separated. In one sentence, communities, histories, politics, family relations are explored through the writer’s ability to embody a rolling stream of blood. This sentence alone has kept me up at night, challenging me, while at the same time pushing me as a writer to not only get to the very fiber of my subject — down in the dirt with it — but to help me understand that anything worth mentioning on the page is worth the time and commitment of getting to know it truly, wholly. It also empowers me as a writer, urging me to cultivate that which I think I do not know — put aside my doubt, own my world as I see it — however unbelievable it may seem to another.”
Tony Ardizzone, author of 'The Whale Chaser,' 'In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu,' and more
“In the short story ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,’ the body of a drowned man washes up on a beach, and a barren village is transformed into a place of beauty and wonder. A nearly perfect story, ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’ ends with a long final sentence that rises to a crescendo and is one of most beautiful and resonant ever written.”
Elliot Holt, author of 'You Are One of Them'
“My favorite is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m glad that his books will live on — for hundreds of years, no doubt.”
Brian Bouldrey, author of 'The Peasants and the Mariners,' 'Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica,' and others
“While I am a huge fan, as is the world, of One Hundred Years of Solitude and nearly all of García Márquez’s work, I have a soft place in my heart for ‘The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira,’ because of its perfect length and form (a tale, which is like a novella only… yarn-y-er). It is a difficult and even cruel story about a girl forced to repay her grandmother by entering the world of prostitution. The story isn’t afraid to find beauty even though it is an ugly story (García Márquez never aestheticizes violence, I don’t think). When Ulises falls in love with Erendira, he betrays his love (to even himself!) by turning glass blue when he touches it. Magic realism seems true because it is full of myth, and myth allows us to get very close to painful subjects, while also gaining some distance on it, seeing pain’s bigger shape.”
