Gabriel García Márquez as Local and Universalist, Traditional cum Modernist Storyteller

Abstract

García Márquez’s reach as a novelist is vast, in both its breadth of subject matter and its range of readership. He writes with equal mastery about love and sex; family life and loneliness; social conflict, dictatorship, and war; childhood, youth, and old age; and much more. His timeframe can cover entire centuries. With the fame achieved by One Hundred Years of Solitude, he became an iconic figure throughout the Hispanic world, his profile further enlarged by his excellent work as a journalist. Eventually his literary reach also became global, with millions of admirers and avowed artistic disciples in the United States, Japan, China, South Asia, Africa, and the Arab world. At the same time, his writing is very locally and vividly rooted in the Caribbean region of his native Colombia. In a similar combination, his narrative builds to a significant degree on traditional, folk elements as well as on the cosmopolitan, modernist workshop of Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Woolf. And, it goes without saying, he fuses magic with realism in a way so seamless and subtle that it has become part of the available repertory for fiction writers across the globe. This chapter briefly recounts García Márquez’s life and development as a writer, surveys his body of work in the light of the above traits, and describes his overall legacy and place in world literary culture.