"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col Aureliano Buendia would remember that distant afternoon when his grandfather took him to discover ice." These opening lines are quite possibly the best known in Spanish literature since "In a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived not long ago a knight."
Miguel de Cervantes' whimsical knight Don Quixote is still probably tilting at the same windmills he's been locked in mortal combat with since he rode off the page in 1605, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez has now definitively been reunited with his beloved grandfather, the model for the patriarch in his 1967 novel 100 Years of Solitude.
The late great Gabo, "Godfather of Magical Realism" and 1982 Nobel laureate, finally succumbed to cancer in his adoptive home of Mexico City on April 17. Had it not been for the success of 100 Years, he may well have blown his brains out. But after early works like Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947) and Leaf Storm (1955) (written in a brothel on Crime Street in the Colombian Caribbean coastal town of Barranquilla) sank without trace, Marquez finally found his voice by remembering the tone his grandmother had used in her own storytelling: "it sounded supernatural and fantastic, but with complete naturalness."
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