Friday 18 April 2014

The saddest piece of news in a hundred years


Sad day, very, very sad day. The death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, although not exactly unexpected, considering his age and illness, feels like a blow in the head. I think I've always thought (as I'm sure many others did) that he was going to live forever. But reality really sucks when it comes to keeping up with fiction, and his Hundred Years of (not quite) Solitude have come to an end before the century could have a chance at reaching its upper limit.
Knowing how his death had been foretold, when he was wrongly declared deceased in 2000, I thought, for a second, that this could be just another mistake; just another joke. But then news came in waves, and now the death of the greatest Latin American author ever is a certitude. A Chronicle of a Death Foretold has, unfortunately, found its confirmation.

This is how I want to remember Gabo: giving the bird to death.
'Coz he hasn't really died; he's just gone somewhere to finish his work.
Source: San Diego Red
With Gabo dead, a new page in the history of literature will have to be written. I don't really care about what so many have found "controversial" in his life. It's not the controversy that I found insanely appealing in his texts, but rather that incredible extent of his story-telling. I don't think anybody else has managed (although many have tried, and some have come very close) to get to that kind of loss in the midst of a flood of fiction, which I discovered in Garcia Marquez's novels.


Things will be said these days: good and bad, in equal measure. Someone like him could not have passed through life without leaving the others debating over his presence. We have a few more hundreds of years to talk and talk. History, that bitch!, is a lot more generous in this regard. In the meantime, he's moved quarters to that celestial Macondo where angels are laughing about us.
Rest in peace, Gabriel Garcia Marquez!

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