Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 6 March 1927 - 17 April 2014

On Style: "In every book I try to make a different path [...]. One doesn't choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that and they see things I hadn't seen. I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean.

On Magical Realism: Literary critic Michael Bell proposes an alternative understanding for García Márquez's style, as the category magic realism is criticized for being dichotimizing and exoticizing, "what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimentally the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed." 

García Márquez and his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza discuss his work in a similar way, "'The way you treat reality in your books...has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it...' 'This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.'"

On Solitude: In response to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's question, "If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood perhaps?" García Márquez replied, "I think it's a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously."

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Solitude of Latin America", he relates this theme of solitude to the Latin American experience, "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."

On Macondo: In his autobiography, García Márquez explains his fascination with the word and concept Macondo. He describes a trip he made with his mother back to Aracataca as a young man:

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant...I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the Ceiba.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (wiki)

NYT

Delightful dangerous literature - 2666

Draw, paint, sing, dance, write, disappear.

Tell me a secret, poet. Reveal your wandering verse, your free form exile. There is no salvation.

Not too detached. Not too sentimental. We are surrounded by androids. Give the zombies simple stuff. Let them wrap their minds around artificial entertainment instruments in their operating rooms. Cut them open.

How do we measure their emotional receptivity? How do they establish meaning inside the daily, brutal violence?

Rolling and tumbling. A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned. People take themselves way too serious. The art and elements of a Japanese folding screen - shapes, edges, designs, natural free form.

Tell me why you loved being a campground guard in Costa Brava, Spain. Was it the night, the dark? The ghosts from your childhood? Yes, I imagine it was all the ghost children, all the dead women in Ciudad Juarez. All the unclaimed corpses. All the young girls. Never identified. Never claimed. Forgotten forever.

How you turned to writing fiction to support your family, your children. How you said you would have rather been a detective instead of a writer. How they are related. How you realized your literary life in Spain after Chile, Mexico and lost highways along your way. Wandering. Literature, the abyss.

You created a new novel form before passing on. Thank you. 2666.

Creating literature is a dangerous occupation. Silence exile and cunning.

Metta.