Perspectives on the life and works of Gabriel García Márquez

Perspectives on the life and works of Gabriel García Márquez: Caribbean Troubadour utilizes a variety of perspectives to approach the life and works of Gabriel García Márquez. Gustavo Arango explores both the big picture and the small details about the Colombian Nobel Prize winner: his development as an artist, the construction of his public persona, the characteristics and the significance of his most relevant works, the secrets and the agonies of his trade, the blurred line between fact and fiction, and the recurrent themes of solitude, truth, love. Arango brings special attention to García Márquez’s Caribbean background, as well as the deep roots of his works in the tradition of the medieval troubadours. Archival materials, never before published in English, give the final touches to this portrayal of one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century.

“Gustavo Arango has written a remarkable work on Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one that combines biography and literary exposition, but transcends those boundaries, resulting in an insightful and beautifully written account of one of the greatest authors of this past century. Not only does he explicate and add meaning to Marquez’s best known books, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, he effectively makes the case that some of Marquez’s lesser known (at least in the Anglo-American world) are also remarkable works worthy of greater scrutiny. While Marquez’s work is most frequently associated with Magic Realism, Arango’s study reveals many other important aspects of Marquez’s work—as Marquez himself writes “My whole life and all my work have been trying to answer the question ‘What is loneliness?’”, “Arango delivers a breathtakingly broad and deep portrait of Garcia Marquez’s life and work with the tone of a trusted colleague and the candor of a caring friend. Arango insists on understanding Garcia Marquez the author from within Garcia Marquez’s positionality because, as Arango says, an author’s work, “…is the expression of a person, and I never get tired of wanting to know about people I care about.” Arango’s combination of care for the person, and a deep scholarly knowledge of the entire oeuvre of Garcia Marquez’s work, results in a warm, intimate and truly enlightening account of one of the world’s most influential Latin American authors.”

Gustavo Arango is professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta.