García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in a remote coastal town in Colombia, and many years later he would become one of the most prominent writers of his time. His masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" "sold like a hot sausage", and he himself became a representative of the "magical realism" style.
The New York Times commented: "One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first literary masterpiece worth reading by all mankind after Genesis. "For a writer, this is probably the greatest compliment and honor.
Today is Márquez's 97th birthday, and I hope the following will help you get rid of your fear of fame, take you to the cute "old horse", and give you the courage to start reading him. After all, the best way to commemorate a writer is to read him consistently.
The following is an excerpt from "Liang Yongan: Love, don't fail the course!" Pushed with the authorization of the publishing house. The subheadings have been prepared by the editors and have been cut due to space constraints.
Author: Liang Yongan.
*: Phoenix.com Reading.
Literature is one of the most beautiful ways for human beings to surviveToday we are going to read Colombian writer Márquez's long story "Love in the Time of Cholera". This ** was published in 1985. Before that, in 1982, Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The winning work is the feature-length ** "One Hundred Years of Solitude". "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a work that is particularly familiar to our Chinese readers, especially at the beginning of this work, which almost every writer can recite the famous sentence: "Years later, in the face of the execution team, Colonel Aureliano Buendía will surely remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice." Critics praisedMárquez writes about the cyclical nature of time, in which he expresses the closure and loneliness of involution. For Márquez, however, this is a particularly realistic way of writing, based entirely on his childhood memories. He himself explained that the initial image at the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was an old man taking his child to see the ice, and Márquez said: This image is the moment when my grandfather took me to see the dromedary in the circus. In Aracataca, where we lived, I didn't have a chance to see ice at all. The administrative board of the banana company once received some kind of frozen sea bream. I was touched by the rock-looking red snapper fish, so I asked my grandfather. My grandfather, who always had to explain everything to me, said they were frozen, so they looked like rocks. I asked him what he meant by 'frozen', and he took me by the hand, took me to the committee, and asked them to open a box of frozen snappers, and I saw the ice. When it comes to deciding between dromedary and ice, I naturally gravitate towards ice, because from a literary standpoint, it's easier to relate. Now, it is unbelievable that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" actually started with such a simple image. This makes people admire Márquez's literary genius very much: his mysterious imagination strangely leads him to start from a small block of ice, write about the history of the Colombian country that has been colonized for hundreds of years, write about the painful changes between Colombians and people, and within the family, and summarize the national memory in the grand narrative with "loneliness". This book established Márquez's place as a great writer in history, and the New York Times commented: "."One Hundred Years of Solitude" is the first literary masterpiece worth reading for all mankind after "Genesis". "This evaluation can be said to be unparalleled. Even more noteworthy for readers around the world is Márquez's literary career. He is a pure writer who really builds his life by literature and gives mankind a magnificent imagination with literature. His life is a banner of literary originality, both magical and full of the power of realism. What kind of life is most worth living? Márquez's legendary life proves that literature is one of the best ways for human beings to surviveHis 87-year poetic journey is a great book that offers the perfect spiritual experience for literary readers all over the world. All of Márquez's ** comes from that encounterGabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. It's a remote seaside town in the northeastern corner of Colombia, near Venezuela. Colombia covers more than 400,000 square kilometres, almost the size of more than four Jiangsu provinces, and now has a population of nearly 50 million. Its southernmost point is on the equator, with the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the west. In the northwest of Colombia, especially in the west, close to the Pacific Ocean, there are many mountain ranges with many river valleys, between 1,000 and 2,000 meters above sea level, and the climate is pleasant. The southern part of Colombia is lush, the temperature is very high, the rainforests are endless, and the damp dead branches and leaves smell of decay, which is not very suitable for human habitation, so there are fewer people. 
The movie "Love in the Time of Cholera" and the valley areas in the north and west are home to many towns and cities. After 1492, Columbus discovered the Americas during the Age of Discovery, and a large number of colonists followed, mainly from Europe, who had the advantage of technology and equipment, and brought unprecedented changes to the region, which was in some ways catastrophic. The Inca Empire in South America was an ethnic group of more than 50 million people. But after the arrival of the Europeans, South America became a resource extraction site, especially some rare resources were frantically exploited. For example, there is a mountain called Potosí in Bolivia, and there is a city of Potosí at the bottom of the mountain. The city was famous, with 160,000 inhabitants around 1650, making it one of the richest cities in the world at the time. Why? Because this place has **, Europe does not produce **, so ** has become a rarity. Colonists flocked to the site and mined it all. The area of Potosi, which used to have 5,000 mines, is now closed. There is also a mountain opposite Potosi called Wakasi, which is now known as the "Weeping Mountain". The name of the mountain sounds sad. The city is now a mess and a barren land. In fact, it is also a symbol of the fate of a period in South America. Colombia was no exception, having become a Spanish colony in 1536. After the colonists came, many settlements were established in the west and northwest, so there were also many industries here. A large number of people gathered here, and these low-level people who entered the city had no money or professional skills, so they could only work at the bottom. In the 19th century, Colombia set off one independence movement after another, and finally established the Republic of Colombia in 1819. Although independent, in essence, the transnational capital of the United States and Britain still monopolizes Colombia's railways, oil, coffee, and banana cultivation, taking away super-profits and making the survival of the Colombian bottom even more difficult.
Márquez was born at a time when the banana industry was setting in the middle of a sunset, and the United Fruit Company had been operating here for nearly 20 years, with trains weaving through shady banana plantations and bustling streets filled with nouveau riche spenders. Marquez recalled: In those years, it was really a lot of money. The dignitaries and wealthy businessmen watched the ** women dance the Kunbia dance while lighting fires and smoking cigarettes with banknotes. Legends like these have drawn adventurers and prostitutes to this remote town on Colombia's northern coast. As a child, Márquez and his grandfather often visited the United Fruit Company's residence, "surrounded by a ring of barbed wire. Everything inside seemed neat and cool, and the dust of the town and the roasting heat were nowhere to be seen. There is also a swimming pool with clear blue water, surrounded by small tables and large umbrellas for shade; The green meadows seem to have been moved from Virginia; The girls play tennis on the grass: Fitzgerald's world has moved to the heart of the tropics. In the evening, the American girls took their cars for a ride through the hot streets of Alakataka. They still wore the fashion of the '20s, the kind that people would wear in the corridors of Montparnasse or Plaza Hotel in New York during the boom of the '20s. The canopy of the car is movable. The girls were delicate and happy, dressed in white sheer tulle, and sat between two big wolfdogs, as if they were not afraid of the heat. But this is only a swan song of burning torches, and when Márquez was a child, the greedy American companies that made quick money withdrew, and the town quickly collapsed, "a storm of strange faces, tents erected on the avenues, men changing clothes in the streets, women sitting on cages with umbrellas open, and abandoned mules starving to death in the inn stables." Márquez and his mother walked through town, "The station that used to be crowded with people and colorful parasols is now dilapidated and without a single person. The train left the mother and son in the dazzling silence of midday, which was broken only by the melancholy song of the cicadas. The train continues its journey as if it had just passed. It's an illusory town. Everything is like ruins, a scene of abandonment, everything swallowed up by heat and oblivion. Stale soil falls on old-fashioned wooden houses and wilting almond trees in the square. ......The first girlfriend my mother met (who was sitting in front of a sewing machine in a dark corner of the room) didn't recognize her at first sight. The two women looked at each other, as if trying to recall the beauty of their old girlhood through their weary and aging appearances. The girlfriend's voice was both surprise and sadness. 'Big sister! She stood up and cried out. The two of them hugged tightly and cried loudly." Márquez was so impressed by this scene that he later said: ".My first ** was born from that time, inspired by that encounter. This sentence is important, and the real meaning is as a famous journalist said: "All the ** of Márquez, comes from that encounter." ”"Fuck, that's what you can do."Poverty has exacerbated political instability in Colombia, and the country's liberals and conservatives are at loggerheads. Márquez's maternal grandfather was a colonel in the liberal army and was "respected by the whole town." He had only ever met a man in his life who dared to speak out against him, and who was later shot and killed. This powerful man is not only politically passionate, but also has a burning lust for women, and has dozens of illegitimate children in the town." Márquez lived with his grandfather until he was 8 years old. In 1940, at the age of 13, he was sent to a prestigious secondary school not far from the capital, Bogotá, as his parents moved to the town of Sinse, near the port of the Sucre River. His father had high expectations for him, hoping that he would become a celebrity along the path of "first-class middle school" and "first-class university", and change the cultural disadvantage of never having a college student in his family. Márquez's father had no idea that his son's feelings about the prestigious high school were cold, completely "a monastery, without heating and without flowers", located in "a distant and bleak town 1,000 kilometers from the sea". 
The movie "Love in the Time of Cholera" is not that Márquez does not have the ability to live independently, but that the human geography has changed too much. The area around Alakataka is a Caribbean region with an oceanic climate, with the sun shining and intense blue and green everywhere. The area around Bogotá, on the other hand, is an Andean region, with clouds and drizzle, and "a delicate gray and a dull green" in view. Márquez recalled: "There were racial differences. The coastal inhabitants were Andalusians of Spanish descent, black Africans, and fierce Caribbean Indians, who were by nature straightforward and cheerful, incompatible with pretentiousness, and had no regard for hierarchy or propriety. They love to dance, always cheerful, with African rhythms and percussion sounds. But the Colombians in the mountains are very different, they maintain the rigid and formal characteristics of the Castilian people of central and western Spain, and have the taciturn and suspicious character of the Chibcha Indians; Their conservatism and respect for etiquette are quiet, and even their humor is not easy to detect. Their manners are polite, often concealing their aggressive character, which is often exposed at an inopportune point with just a few glasses of wine. Like the scenery that surrounds the inhabitants of the Andes, their ** is poignant:It tells about abandonment, parting, and lost love. For Márquez, a 13-year-old from the Caribbean coast, he "suddenly realized that he was going to have to live in this strange world." He watched with horror and horror at such a bleak scene in the capital. As night drew close, the bell rang to call for vespers. He looked through the small window of the taxi at the gray streets in the rain. The thought of living in this funeral-like atmosphere for several years made his heart feel indescribably heavy. Thinking of this, he couldn't help crying loudly, which made the superintendent who came to pick him up at the station very confused." In fact, the great change in the environment is not a bad thing, and there is a situation in the growth of people called "opposites and complement each other". The strong contrast in human geography makes the young Marquez urgently need a spiritual channel to release his depression. He found literature, such as "The Magic Mountain" in Germany, "The Three Musketeers" and "Notre Dame de Paris" in France, "The Black Sailor on the Narcissus" in England ......Fortunately, there was a "Stone and Sky" literary group in Bogotá at that time, which was full of rebellious literary youths, who gave Márquez the free heat of the sun, so that he could immerse himself in the sea of literature and sail away. Márquez later said gratefully: "I wouldn't have said I would have been a writer without 'Stone and Sky'." In 1947, at the age of 20, Márquez was admitted to the National University of Bogotá to study law. It's not that he loves law, it's because of his parents' expectations. A judge or lawyer has a high social status and can bring glory to the whole family. This reluctant choice certainly did not reassure Márquez, who was in the law department but lived in the literature department: my favorite pastime at that time was to board the tram with blue glass windows on Sundays and drive from Plaza Bolívar to Calle de Chile for five cents. I spent those sad afternoons in the tram, which seemed to drag an endless tail strung together by other idle Sundays. And the only thing I did on this laissez-faire ride was to read poetry, read poetry, read poetry! If I take a tram in the city, I might be able to read a street poem until the night rain falls and the lights come on. Then I ran through the silent cafés of the old town to find a gentleman to walk with me and talk with me about the psalms, the psalms, the psalms I had just read. Suddenly, one day, Márquez borrowed a copy of the Austrian writer Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis from a classmate, and as soon as he read the beginning, he was shocked: "One morning Gregor Samsa woke up from a restless sleep to find himself lying in bed transformed into a giant beetle. ”Such a simple sentence made Márquez "tremble" and exclaimed, "Fuck, how can you do this". The next day, he wrote his first short story "The Third Helplessness" for the first time, and since then he has completely turned to writing. For the first time, a small town called "Macondo" appearedThis turn changed his lifestyle completely, "He was raunchy and always went in and out of cafes with a book in his hand. He can stay overnight in any place, so he gives the impression of being a swinging guy. However, at this time, he no longer reads poetry and poetry vigorously, but is completely obsessed with reading, first reading Dostoevsky, then Tolstoy, Dickens, and then the French writers Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, and Zola in the last century. In April 1948, a severe outbreak broke out in Bogotá, with Márquez's rented house burned down and the University of Bogotá closed indefinitely. In the midst of the turmoil, he transferred to the University of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast in northern Colombia, where he wrote while studying and wrote a daily commentary for Cartagena's Cosmos. Returning to the familiar shores of the Caribbean Sea, his literary dreams became more active, and he soon became acquainted with a group of literary youths in Barranquilla, an industrial city more than 100 kilometers away, who formed a "Baransky Literary Group" and was keen on modernist literature. In 1950, Márquez simply moved to Barranquilla, where he wrote a daily column for the Herald and began writing his first full-length story, "Dead Leaves." This "Baransky Literary Group" had a great influence on Márquez. The members of the literary group were very young lads who were particularly fond of drinking, had a bold personality, and got together to discuss the works of great writers, Joyce, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Faulkner, ......And the place where all this is discussed is often a brothel! Márquez misses this period very much: for me, those years were a time when I was dazzled and discovered not only in literature but also in life. We used to get drunk and talk about literature until dawn. Every night, we would talk about at least 10 books that I hadn't read, and the next day, they would lend them to me, and they would have everything. We also have a friend who owns a bookstore, and we often help him make staple lists, and every time a box of books arrives from Buenos Aires, we celebrate. For a time in order to write, he stayed in a cheap hotel where "prostitutes frequented". Although it was cheap, he sometimes didn't have the money to stay overnight, so he gave the original manuscript he was writing to the janitor as collateral. Márquez recalled: "The hotel was huge, and the partition walls of the rooms were made of cardboard, so all the secrets in the neighboring rooms could be heard. I can make out a lot of **advanced** voices,I was struck by the fact that most of them did not come to have fun, but to confide in their dewy mates. It was in this dilapidated hotel that Márquez read "Mrs. Dalloway" by the British writer Virginia Woolf, and he felt for a moment that the clouds were clearer, and the sky of literature was clearer. He later fondly recalled: "If I hadn't read this passage from 'Mrs. Dalloway' when I was 20 years old, I might be a different person today." This is what Márquez said: But, no doubt, there was a big man sitting in the car: "The big man passed through Bond Street in a cover, and the common men were within reach; It was probably the first and last time they were so close to the monarch of England, the immortal symbol of the nation. By the time London was reduced to an overgrown road, and the people who had hurried down the sidewalks this Wednesday morning were all reduced to bones, with a few wedding rings scattered among them, and countless stuffing stuffing from rotten teeth, curious antiquarians digging through the ruins of time to figure out who was in the car. "I remember reading this passage in a modest room in a hotel, enduring the scorching heat, while bombarding mosquitoes. It completely changed my concept of time. Perhaps, it also made me vaguely see the whole process of the destruction of Macondo in an instant, ** to its final end. Also, I thought, isn't it the distant cause of "The Patriarch's Autumn"? And this book is about the mystery of human power, about loneliness and poverty. Márquez once said that "The Fall of the Patriarchs" was the best he felt he had written**, but he credited Virginia Woolf with his most beloved work, and the reverence was palpable. 
In 1954, Márquez moved back to Bogotá to work as a staff writer for the newspaper Observer. In 1955, his long story "Dead Branches and Leaves" was published. This ** is only about 90,000 words, but it is of great significance. For the first time, a small town called "Macondo" appears, which is a metaphor for his hometown of Aracataca. Since then, "Macondo" has become an iconic place name in Márquez**, and it is also the place where the story of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" takes place. The omnipotence of the "banana company" in "Dead Branches and Leaves" and the lonely plight of the three generations of the old colonel's family are the epitome of Márquez's later creative themes. Unlock the key to Marquez's "magical realism".In 1955, Márquez's life changed dramatically. As a contributing writer for the Observer, he wrote a series of articles exposing the dereliction of duty of the Observer, which attracted warnings from the Observer, and he was forced to go abroad to Paris to work as the Observer's correspondent in Europe. The following year, the Observer was shut down by the ** regime, and at the age of 29, he had to stay in Paris and continue to write in poverty. When he was at his poorest, he even collected all kinds of empty bottles and sold them to stores, barely making ends meet. Since then, he has lived in exile, moving from place to place in Eastern Europe, Venezuela, Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and Spain. In the meantime, they got married in 1959 and had children. Despite the turbulence of his life, he has always maintained the vigorous creativity of a writer, and one after another has appeared: in 1959, he published the long story "Evil Hours"; In 1962, he published a collection of short stories "The Funeral of Aunt Grande" and a novella "The Colonel Who Nobody Wrote to Him"; In 1965, he began writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was published in 1967. In 1970, he published "The Story of a Shipwreck Survivor"; In 1973, he published a collection of short stories, "Innocent Erentila"; In 1975, "The Autumn of the Patriarchs" was published; In 1981, he published "A Case of Publicity in Advance"; Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982; In 1985, he published Love in the Time of Cholera. Subsequently, he also published a collection of short stories, "A Happy Funeral in a Dream and Twelve Tales of a Foreign Land", and the play "An Abuse of Love for a Seated Man". After 1999, he published the first volume of his three-volume memoir "Living to Tell" and the long ** "Memoirs of a Bitter Prostitute". This was not easy, as he was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999 and underwent chemotherapy, which caused massive neuronal loss in his brain. Coupled with the fact that the Márquez family has a genetic history of Alzheimer's, writing is even tougher. In January 2006, he announced that he would stop writing, but in 2010 he edited and compiled a collection of speeches, "I'm Not Here to Speak." Particularly delightful for Chinese readers is that in 2010, after two years of research into the Chinese market, Márquez and his female publishing agent, Carmen, finally agreed to officially authorize China to publish the Chinese version of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This sounds incredible, 43 years after the Spanish version in 1967. The reason for this is that when Márquez visited China in 1990, he found that there were various unauthorized publications of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" in the bookstore. This surprised and angered him, and vowed to "not authorize China to publish his works, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude, for 150 years after his death." After 1992, when China formally acceded to the Universal Copyright Convention, more than 100 Chinese publishers submitted copyright applications to Márquez, but he refused to accept any of them. It wasn't until 2008 that he was moved by the sincerity of Chinese publishers, and after several investigations, he finally opened his heart to the Chinese publishing industry. His insistence on not granting permission for many years has been a great impetus to China's cause of safeguarding intellectual property rights. And his formal authorization is a huge support for China's publishing industry. Such a great writer passed away in Mexico City on April 18, 2014, but the gift he gave to the Chinese literary community at the end of his life makes us no longer remember not only the "loneliness" he wrote, but also the warmth of his crossing the Pacific Ocean. What we feel most when we miss him is that South America is the place where the "mixed economy" and "mixed-race culture" are most developed, and he has extremely rich cultural factors: Spaniards, Indians, Europeans, Africans, Americans, Mexicans, ......He loved all the spiritual flowers of human culture, and warmly praised the Jewish writer Kafka, the English writer Woolf, and the American writer Ernest HemingwayThe heart of diverse and open literature grows brightly in the vast span. At the same time, he loves his cultural roots infinitely, and will always guard the spiritual hometown of "Macondo". This is especially precious when the Third World is facing the strong cultures of Europe and the United States. His sentiments go back a long way: in Latin America we have always been taught to be Spaniards. On the one hand, it is true, because the Spanish element forms part of our cultural identity, which is undeniable. But on that trip to Angola, I found out that we were still Africans, or mixed-race. It was then that I realized that our culture was a hybrid culture that was enriched by the strengths of others. In my homeland, there are cultures that are very different from those of the indigenous peoples of the highlands. In our Caribbean, African slavery was combined with the rich imagination of the pre-colonial Native Americans, and later with the whimsy of the Andalusians and the worship of the supernatural by the Galicians. This talent for magical depictions of reality is found in the Caribbean and Brazil. It was there that a kind of literature, a kind of **, a kind of painting like the work of Vifredo Lin, emerged, which were the means of aesthetic expression of that region. The Caribbean has taught me to look at reality from a different perspective, to see the supernatural as an integral part of our daily lives. The Caribbean is a very different world, and its first work of magical literature was The Diary of Christopher Columbus, which describes a variety of exotic plants and mythical worlds. Yes, the history of the Caribbean is full of magic, brought by black slaves from their African homeland, as well as by Swedish and Dutch and British pirates. These pirates were able to run an opera house in New Orleans and have their wives and ladies studded with diamonds. The Caribbean region is home to a wide variety of people and other people that are very different from each other that you can't see anywhere else in the world. I knew each of its islands: there were mulatto-white women with golden complexions like honey, green eyes, and yellow turbans; There were Chinese who washed clothes and sold amulets mixed with Indian blood; There are the green-haired Indians who come out of the ivory shops they run and on the road; and dusty, sweltering towns, with storm-battered huts and sun-protective glass skyscrapers on the other; There are also seven colors of the sea there. Come on, I can't finish talking about the Caribbean. Not only is it a world that taught me to write, but it's also the only place that doesn't make me feel like a stranger. These words are the key to Marquez's "magical realism".