Gabriel Garcia Marquez turns 80
“He was born in Colombia, but all of us who speak Spanish have in him a referent of perfection and the creation of beauty,” Colombian Ambassador to Spain Noemi Sanin said in Madrid.
A referent of perfection. If I ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is on my list of things to do, I hereby promise to to close my acceptance speech by screaming, “I am a referent of perfection! You will all grovel at my feet!”, and then drop the microphone and walk off stage, where I will pull a flask of very expensive scotch from my pocket and proceed to get very, very drunk.
Seriously, I read 100 Years of Solitude in college, and I really liked it. My Spanish isn’t strong enough to appreciate the original, but my translation was enjoyable. I’m sure it loses something, so that means the original must be really, really good.
I mean, the guy is the father of magic realism. Anyone who’s ever taken a Spanish class has probably heard their Spanish teacher gush about “realismo magico”. This dude started all that. That’s pretty cool.
So, go read on of his books. I’ve only read the one, but I figure the rest are good, too.