Word: garces
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Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda (a 1971 Nobel laureate) once honored his colleague's work as "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." The Swedish Academy echoed that judgment when it awarded Colombian Author Gabriel García Márquez, 54, the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature last week. "His novels and short stories," reads the citation, combine the fantastic and the realistic "in a richly composed world of the imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts...
...those fitting occasions when the award did not have overtones of geographical compensation or willful obscurity, even though García Márquez is from a country with a modest literary tradition. The journalist and fiction writer has produced a series of enduring and popular works, including One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). In them, García Márquez, a great admirer of William Faulkner, has created a kind of tropical Yoknapatawpha County, where "the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light." There...
...García Márquez has been a vocal irritant to rightist regimes from South Africa to Salvador, counts Socialist French President François Mitterrand as a personal friend, and once donated the $22,000 proceeds of a 1972 literary prize to a small left-wing group in Venezuela. But the author refuses to be categorized. "I have never belonged to a Communist Party," he says, "and my only weapon is my typewriter." That weapon has proved to be a formidable capitalist tool. Solitude alone has 10 million copies in print in 32 languages, and has opened publishers...
Last Thursday in Mexico City, where García Márquez resides in an elite suburb with his wife Mercedes, a flustered maid served coffee while the shy, stout author made plans to accept his award in Stockholm. He intends to wear the traditional Mexican guayabera, a lightweight shirt worn outside the trousers. Said he: "To avoid putting on a tuxedo, I'll stand the cold." The creator of fictional ice, amnesia and ascending bedsheets could hardly do otherwise...
DIED. Raúl Roa García, 75, Foreign Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, whose acerbic voice enunciated Fidel Castro's scathing views of U.S. policies toward his country; in Havana. A supporter of Fulgencio Batista until they had a falling-out, Roa was named by Castro after he ousted the dictator. Despite Roa's anti-Yanqui stance, he negotiated an agreement with the U.S. in 1965 that allowed an airlift of Cuban emigrants and another in 1973 providing for Cuban punishment of airplane hijackers...