UnNews:Gabriel García Marquez dies
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This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
18 April 2014
“It was inevitable: the scent of what-d'you-call-it always reminded him of thingummybob.”
Gabriel García Marquez, arguably the most celebrated South American writer of recent years, has died aged 87 in Mexico City.
The Colombian was widely credited with popularising magic realism, a sub-genre of literature in which everybody speaks quite formally and then people like burst into flames and stuff.
A little known fact about Marquez is that he owed his initial success in English to a mistranslation. His novel Cien anos de soledad (100 Lonely Anuses) was accidentally translated into 100 Years of Solitude by a translator who mistook "anos" for "años", and book groups on both sides of the Atlantic thought his extended comedic descriptions of anuses were metaphors for loneliness.
Ironically for a man whose work often pondered the role of memories in our lives, he succumbed to senile dementia in his later years, which meant his final works were less well received. Tom Barryman of the New York Times said of Marquez's last work, Hang On, What Was I Saying?, "This is 354 pages about a man arguing about something he fails to remember. It's like a transcription of a fight in a rest home."
As the disease progressed, Marquez spent the last few years confined to a wheelchair, communicating only by ringing a bell (one ring for 'Yes', no rings for 'No'). He died peacefully in his retirement home, having rigged his wheelchair with a homemade explosive, taking a Chilean meth dealer and his head honcho out with him.
Sources[edit | edit source]
- Leverage, "Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies" BBC, April 18, 2014