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 One Hundred Years of Solitude.
He was raised mainly by his maternal grandparents, who had a huge impact on his life. His grandfather Colonel Nicolas Márquez was outspoken against the banana plantation massacres in the year of García Márquez’s birth, influencing the author to become a political activist, strong critic of North American “imperialism” and a close friend of Fidel Castro. García Márquez was also involved in peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels.
His grandmother Tranquilina was a fervent believer in ghosts, spirits and magic – something evident in García Márquez’s “magical realism” style. In One Hundred Years of Solitude a Spanish galleon is beached in the jungle; the villagers suffer for years from a plague of insomnia; and a flying carpet swoops through the air. All of this is accepted as fact by the characters in the novel.
Despite the obvious cinematographic potential of the book, García Márquez never sold the film rights – although many of his other books were made into films. Love In The Time of Cholera, starring Javier Bardem, was filmed in Cartagena in 2007.
García Márquez began his career as a journalist, but, following in the footsteps of his heroes William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, soon dedicated himself to writing novels.
He married Mercedes Barcha in 1958 and their two sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo followed their father into the arts – Rodrigo as a script writer, and Gonzalo as an author.
García Márquez’s last work, Memories of My Melancholy Whores – the story of a 90 year-old man who falls in love for the first time in his life with a young concubine – was published in 2004.
“The twists and turns of life were always the source of his creativity,” said Jaime.
“He always said that reality was stranger than fiction.”
Source: Harriet Alexander, The Telegraph
