Gabriel García Márquez Influenced Many
The great Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez died Thursday in his home in Mexico City at age 87. Best known for his novel “One Hundred Years Of Solitude,” he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Children’s book author Monica Brown of Flagstaff wrote “My Name Is Gabito: The Life Of Gabriel García Márquez” about his impact.
Márquez’s books were translated into dozens of languages. “One Hundred Years Of Solitude” sold tens of millions of copies all over the world. Brown said she read it when she was 17.
“I can say with complete honesty that it changed the course of my life,” Brown said. “I was intrigued by the book. I wanted to live inside the pages of the book. And as a Peruvian-American as the daughter of a North American father and a South American mother I had never encountered something that so captured the complexity of my huge extended family.”
Brown said because of his novel she went on to study and teach literature and eventually write her own books. Here’s an excerpt from her children’s book, “My Name Is Gabito: The Life Of Gabriel García Márquez:”
Can you imagine a shipwrecked sailor living on air and seaweed for eight days? Can you imagine a trail of yellow butterflies fluttering their wings to songs of love? Once, there was a little boy named Gabito who could.
Márquez masterfully wove the magic into reality and introduced so many to the literary genre known as magical realism.
Brown said Márquez was the perfect inspiration for a children’s book because children more than adults perhaps can understand the way the magical and the real exist in one moment.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The photo caption with this story has been modified to reflect the title of Monica Brown's book, “My Name Is Gabito: The Life Of Gabriel García Márquez."
Updated 4/21/14 at 3:58 p.m.
