Unknown Melancholies

When I first saw today's Google Doodle, I got super excited because from looking at it knew it was about Márquez. Turns out today is his 91st birthday, so I of course have to do something in honor of that. I was originally going to cram this little birthday message into my macroblog, but it's already wordy enough. Plus, I wanted to give a brief little lesson on Márquez and his contributions to literature.

I know I already have an "About 100 Years of Solitude" page on this blog, but I didn't go into a great deal of depth there in terms of who Márquez is. I know I already talked about Márquez's role as the definer of magical realism, but for those of you who didn't read my second microblog, magical realism is a literary genre in which the mundane and the fantastic are both equally plausible. Márquez said he took inspiration for it from the unbelievability of Latin American history — an illusory Eldorado plagued by conquistadors, despots and revolutions.

If that wasn't cool enough, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts".

Born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, Columbia, he grew up with his grandfather, a pensioned colonel from civil war. Many of his novels are based on his childhood experiences growing up in Columbia. 100 Years of Solitude's Macondo (and its history) are heavily based on that of Columbia, and there's striking similarities between Colonel Aureliano Buendia and Márquez's own grandfather. Márquez went to a Jesuit college, beginning to read law, but he instead switched to working as a journalist. His most notable novels include One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch. Márquez also wrote screenplays as well as continued working as a journalist throughout his writing career.

But the best piece of information I found is that Márquez's full name is Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, but in Latin America he's affectionately known as "Gabo". For whatever reason, I find this to be absolutely adorable.

So happy birthday Gabriel García Márquez!