Posted on 07/07/2012 8:33:50 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The brother of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez has revealed that the 85-year-old Nobel Laureat is suffering from dementia.
Jaime García Márquez, a civil engineer, told a group of students at a lecture in the Colombian city of Cartagena that his elder brother often telephones him to ask basic questions.
“He has problems with his memory. Sometimes I cry because I feel like I’m losing him,” he said.
The author, who has lived in Mexico City since 1961, is one of the most influential and highly-acclaimed living writers. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, and Carlos Fuentes, the late Mexican writer, described him as “the most popular and perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes”.
García Márquez’s most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has been translated into 37 languages and sold more than 20 milllion copies.
“He is doing well physically, but he has been suffering from dementia for a long time,” said Jaime - the first person in the family to publicly speak about “Gabo”’s illness.
“He still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had. But it’s a disease that runs in the family.” Both García Márquez’s younger brother and mother suffered from Alzheimers.
And indeed mental illness, and the power of the mind, has been a feature of García Márquez’s writing.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, an epic tale of seven generations of the Buendía family in a fictional Colombian village, begins with the story of a family unable to care for their senile grandfather. The General in His Labyrinth, charting the final days of Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, shows a broken and confused elderly man.
García Márquez was born in the small Colombian town of Aracataca - the inspiration for his fictional town of Macondo, setting for
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I had to read Cien Anos de Soledad for Spanish class, and was excited when the English translation (One Hundred Years of Solitude, done quite well) came out a couple of years later.
The first paragraph (in Spanish or English) is as good as A Farewell to Arms, and if it doesn't hook you into a book you'll enjoy, you probably don't read or appreciate much good literature (not that there's anything wrong with that -- I like Michael Connelly and Daniel Silva, too)...
I read Love in the Time of Cholera during the great unrequited love of my youth.
I didn’t wait around that long....
God smiled on this great writer and old fool. Marquez has lived long enough to play the tethered, old Buendía himself.
Aye, but let's spare him the Colonel's firing squad. The old fool's entitled to his leftest opinions, after what he's given us. I love his works, and Neruda's poetry, too, and I believe most FReaders are mature enough to read them both with reverence and awe.
This is good stuff, people. So many of our great American writers have a port list -- but we still read Hemingway and the rest, and listen to Willie Nelson and Steve Earle.
Don't deny yourself Garcia-Marquez. Read!
What you say may be true but Marquez deserved his. He is magical.
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