2024-04-24 22:19:07
It was 2:50 p.m. on Thursday, April 17, 2014 when, inside his residence in Pedregal de San Ángel, located south of Mexico City, the death of the Colombian writer was confirmed. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He had died a few minutes ago, due to the cancer that had been diagnosed since 1999, and that by then he had returned to spread through his healthy organs. His joy, however, was to die surrounded by his family.
Ten years later, despite the fact that his work or person was never forgotten, his name reappeared in comments from readers, specialists and the literary community, first due to the announcement of the publication of See you in Augustthe unpublished novel that remained boxed together with the rest of his files and that only saw the light, with the authorization and help of his children, universal heirs of the Colombian novelist, on March 6, despite the fact that, they say, García Márquez asked that that manuscript was destroyed.
A little more than a month later, on the exact day that marked ten years since his death, the first trailer for the series based on One hundred years of loneliness, based on the novel of the same name by the Colombian chronicler. So the tape that gives the column its title “came” to my memory: Gabo, the creation of Gabriel García Márquez (2015). More like a whim, as a way to divert the focus from that new novel and the disastrous comments surrounding a series that has not yet been released.
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In the aforementioned documentary, directed by English Justin Webster (Aldershot, 1963), they parade, through a rigorous investigation, from Jaime and Aida García Márquez, Gabo’s brothers, through Gerald Martin, the writer’s biographer, to characters of the stature of the literary agent Carmen Balcells, the journalist Jon Lee Andersonformer Colombian president César Gaviria and even Bill Clinton, former president of the United States.
However, despite the parade of relevant names, the one who serves as the backbone is the writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Bogotá, 1973) who not only shares nationality with García Márquez, but also some distinctions that place him as one of the most important writers of his generation.
The author of The sound of the things when they fall (Alfaguara, 2011) serves as a bridge between the anecdotes and assertions of the rest of the voices, as it provides a more analytical and incisive vision not only about the character who became the author of The colonel has no one to write to himbut also about his work, whose admiration allows him to naturally blur issues of what Gabo wrote over time.
Not only from the review of an interview before which he places his eyes with a terrifying obsession, but because he covers key points in the life of the author of Story of a castaway from – if possible – genesis. And it is not that what the rest narrates is less valuable, but that the information provided by Juan Gabriel Vásquez allows the other data to be exponentiated.
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It is likely that this documentary exercise by the English filmmaker does not compete with a written biography of the Colombian author, but it does allow us to recognize in Gabo the person who went beyond what he wrote, where he came from, what were some of his setbacks, why he took some decisions, what was the origin of his strengths and what shaped his political ideology.
It is very clear to know that a documentary is not and will not be enough to get to know an author or a relevant figure, but it does serve to build the path. Especially in exercises without stratospheric aspirations that could fall apart in their construction, something that Webster dispenses with to opt for simplicity to come out well.
Finally, all of the above is an excuse to continue remembering, to present to those who do not know, because it is possible, Gabriel García Márquez, indefatigable novelist, reporter as there are more scarce in these modern times, of insurmountable values, and even Nobel Prize in Literature. A character who, on top of that, reminded us that the first symptom of old age is starting to look like his own father.
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2024-04-24 22:19:07