By Sheeva Azma
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Gabriel García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature for combining “the fantastic and the realistic” in “a richly composed world of imagination.”
It’s Nobel Prize week! In previous years, we’ve commemorated this important week on our blog, so I’m back to keep the tradition going strong for its fifth year!
If you want to know how to win a Nobel Prize in the life sciences, read this article. If you are, in fact, in search of my best book recommendations to add to your to-read list, keep reading.
Today, I’m talking about my favorite books and short stories by one of my favorite authors, Gabriel García Márquez (or GGM for short). GGM was born in 1927 and grew up in Colombia, abandoning law school to become a journalist and writer. He eventually took up writing fiction full-time, and moved to Mexico City, where he lived until his death in 2014. You can read more of his bio on the Nobel Prize website.
GGM won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature “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.” He is considered one of the founders of the magical realism literary genre, which is a genre of fiction which blends realism and magic. I love magical realism because I am mostly a nonfiction reader and the stories still feel “real” while having some “magical” elements.
I minored in Spanish Literature at MIT, and sometime after I graduated, I got into reading GGM’s short stories and novels. I really enjoyed them!
So, here are my favorite books and short stories by GGM. I tried to rank them, but really, they are all great works of literature. This is not meant to be an authoritative list or ranking in any way, but a way to tell you about some short stories and novels I have enjoyed. If you have any book recommendations for me in the nonfiction, magical realism, historical fiction, or related genres, feel free to send them my way!
10. News of a Kidnapping – The book is based on the kidnappings of several prominent Colombians, who were mostly journalists, by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel in the early 1990s as a tactic to pressure the government against extradition.
9. The Leaf Storm – In this novella, a family in the fictional town of Macondo (also the focus of One Hundred Years of Solitude which is #2 in this list) honors a promise to provide funeral services for the most hated man in the village, a reclusive doctor. The narrative shifts between an old colonel, his daughter, and his grandson, exploring various themes.
8. The General in His Labyrinth – Simón Bolívar played a crucial role in liberating much of South America from Spanish colonial rule including the countries of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama. In this work, GGM writes a fictional account of the last few months of Simón Bolívar’s life until he became increasingly disenchanted by South American politics and died of tuberculosis in 1830.
7. Of Love and Other Demons – A twelve-year old girl, bitten by a dog, is believed to be possessed, so she is held in a convent for an exorcism. There begins her forbidden, tragic love story with the priest assigned to her exorcism.
6. Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor – In 1955, when GGM was a journalist working for a newspaper in Bogota, Colombia, a Colombian shipwreck produced a single survivor on a deserted beach. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is GGM’s recounting of that event. Back then, he wrote a series of newspaper articles fictionally recounting the details of that event from that sailor’s perspective, which were collated into this book.
5. No One Writes to the Colonel – An elderly colonel and his wife endure poverty and political repression in a small Colombian town, while the colonel waits for a long-promised government pension to arrive after fifteen fruitless years.
4. The Autumn of the Patriarch – This story chronicles, in nonlinear episodes including elements such as both satire and tragedy, an unnamed Carribean dictator’s legacy of corruption and solitude.
3. Chronicle of a Death Foretold – The title of this short story is somewhat self-explanatory. It’s about a murder that people knew would happen, but didn’t try to stop. You’ll have to read it to find out more!
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude – This magical realism work details the rise and fall of the Buendía family over seven generations in the mythical town of Macondo, trapped in a tragic cycle of solitude that leads to their extinction.
1. Love in the Time of Cholera – Fermina and Florentino fall deeply in love in their youth, but are kept apart by familial and social obstacles, leading Fermina to marry another man while Florentino waits faithfully for over fifty years. After decades of separation and life’s changes, they reunite in old age.
That’s about it for this year’s Nobel Prize themed blog! If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to our blog and/or sharing this blog post. Read our other book reviews and book lists here.
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