It is time to read Gabriel García Márquez

I read A Catcher in the Rye only after J.D. Salinger died in 2010.  I began to read John Updike in 2008, and he died within one year in January 2009.  Most of the books I have read whose authors had been gone long ago.  My daughters suggested me to read One hundred Years of Solitude, but I never did.  I picked up Love in the Time of Cholera last year.  It is time for me to read Gabriel García Márquez; to finish Love in the Time of Cholera and also to read One hundred Years of Solitude as he passed away on April 17.

Over the years I only read books written by American and British authors; Janice kept assuring me that the translation versions of great novels are as good as the original English ones.  Based on reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (still an ongoing ‘open book’ for me) and Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, I think Janice is right.

A New York Times article says “he read intensely — the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain and Melville; the Europeans Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Virginia Woolf.” But Márquez once said, “I’ve never tried to imitate authors I’ve admired. On the contrary, I’ve done all I could not to imitate them.”  This may be why he is an original in perfecting the “magic realism” style.  It is safe to say that he has the caliber of the likes of Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway.

He was politically left-winged; a good friend of Fidel Castro, who may be a lesser of two evils comparing with the Latin America’s dictators, such as General Augusto Pinochet of Chile.