Gabriel García Márquez: A Magician of Magical Realism
Much of Márquez’s life was shaped by repression and political violence, beginning in his university years. How did this later influence him and his work? Read on to find out.
Gabriel García Márquez was a prominent Colombian journalist and writer. He was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia. He grew up with his mother’s side of the family in the coastal town of Aracataca. Márquez studied law and journalism in Bogotá and Cartagena. Of the two, he chose journalism, although he did not complete his studies. He died in Mexico City on April 17, 2014.
Politics
Much of Márquez’s life was shaped by repression and political violence, beginning in his university years. In particular, the spring of 1948 in Bogotá is remembered for El Bogotazo, a massive ten-hour uprising triggered by the assassination of the Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Following this event, the young Márquez moved to Cartagena to continue his studies. However, he soon abandoned academia to pursue a career in journalism.
After returning from Europe in late 1957, Márquez once again encountered political instability, this time influenced by the fall of a Venezuelan dictator. The violence of the period led him to become more invested in the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.
Journalism and Literary Work
Márquez’s early literary work was strongly influenced by Kafka’s existentialism. The stories he wrote between 1947 and 1952 were later collected in Eyes of a Blue Dog. Around the same time, in 1948, he began working as a journalist. In the following years, Márquez worked for newspapers in various cities across Latin America and later Europe.
In Europe, he travelled through countries behind the Iron Curtain and lived in Italy and France as a foreign correspondent in the mid-1950s. He reported for Latin American magazines, writing about communism and socialism as he observed them in Europe. These essays and reports were later published in the collection Journey Through Eastern Europe (1978).
In the 1960s, Márquez’s career took him to Mexico City. There, in 1979, he co-founded HABEAS, an organization dedicated to fighting abuses of power. Four years later, in 1982, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Magical Realism
Márquez is one of the key figures of the literary style known as magical realism. His most famous works are recognized for their use of magical elements, a quality that ultimately contributed to his Nobel Prize. Magical realism is best described as a blend of realism with myth, legend, and the extraordinary. In other words, it introduces magical elements into otherwise realistic settings - such as the child born with a pig’s tail in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez himself once said that he did not believe such people existed, only to discover after the novel’s publication that similar medical conditions do, in fact, occur. Perhaps people with three eyes exist too, who knows? Or people with four ears?
Major Works
Some of Márquez’s most notable literary works include La hojarasca (Leaf Storm, 1955), heavily influenced by Faulkner; El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel, 1961); and El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), a novel that sharply criticises dictatorial regimes. In 1985, he published El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera), a romantic story of enduring love set against the backdrop of a cholera epidemic, as well as a portrait of Latin American society at the turn of the century.
His later works include the autobiography Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale, 2002), Yo no vengo a decir un discurso (I’m Not Here to Give a Speech, 2014), and finally the unfinished novel En agosto nos vemos (Until August), published posthumously in 2024.
What do you think of Until August? Was it right to publish it, despite Márquez’s wish for the manuscript to be destroyed?
#marquez #gabrielgarciamarquez #magicrealism #biography #literature #books
Sources:
Uskoković, Davor, Vodič kroz lektiru za srednje škole, Zagreb: Mozaik knjiga, 2009
Márquez, Gabriel García, Putovanje po istočnoj Europi, Zagreb: vbz, 2018
Márquez, Gabriel García, Skandal stoljeća, Zagreb: vbz, 2022
Echevarría, Roberto González. "Gabriel García Márquez". Encyclopedia Britannica, 3 Dec. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez.