BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Oct. 13, 2009
Celebrated author Gabriel García Márquez has become a household name among literary circles, college classrooms and generations of bibliophiles worldwide, but most people just know "Gabo" through his captivating tales across the Colombian landscape.
Now, however, the story of the magic realist's life has emerged from behind the texts as part of a multimedia exhibition dedicated to the author's past 82 years.
"Una VidO ("A Life"), on display through Monday, Oct. 26 at the Palacio del Bellas Artes in Mexico City's Centro Histórico, culls together black-and-white photographs, yellowing manuscripts, personal letters, battered book covers and audio archives in the Adamo Boari basement gallery.
The exhibit also coincides with the Oct. 19 Spanish-language release of U.S. author Gerald Martin's biography "Gabriel García Márquez: A Life," first published in English in May. Martin will give an official presentation at Bellas Artes on Oct. 26 alongside Mexican writers Elena Poniatowska, JosAc Agustín and Gonzalo Celorio.
Both events were coordinated by the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA), the National Council for Culture and Arts (Conaculta) and the biography's publisher, Random House Mondadori.
"This exhibit is an invitation to rediscover the universe of García Márquez," curator Gerardo de la Cruz told The News at the Oct. 8 inauguration.
"This is what interests us... the magical, the political, the experimental, the surrealist and the journalistic," he said. "This is an attempt to give his own version of himself."
De la Cruz said that García Márquez's family donated part of the exhibit's materials while other components were already on-hand from a recent exhibit on the author's 1967 bestselling novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which he penned in Mexico and largely contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
Considered García Márquez's magnum opus, the book has since been translated into more than 27 languages and is the bestselling Spanish-language book in modern history, second only to "Don Quixote."
Pedro Huerta, general director of Random House Mondadori in Mexico, said that the pre-book launch exhibition follows the 17 years of research that Martin committed to the biography.
"García Márquez is a highlight and key figure in Latin America, and I think it is very important to celebrate his life," he said after the ceremony.
"This is the only biography that García Márquez says he 'tolerates' because it's as accurate as he thinks it can get in a complicated life like he has had."
Huerta noted that English-language copies of Martin's biography should already be available in any of Mexico's major book retailers as well as online.
Down the steps and into the Adamo Boari gallery, the exhibit opens with the first of three stages structured after the biography's chapters.
"The Seeds of Writing" begins in 1899, tracing his family roots from various regions in Colombia to Aracataca, the town where García Márquez was born in 1927 before his family moved to Baranquilla.
The exhibit starts with an enlarged copy of his parents' aged wedding photo and a 1928 picture of the author in his wide-eyed infancy. The first period marks his initial exposure to poetry and storytelling and his eventual departure from home to pursue traveling adventures, journalistic opportunities and to publish his first stories.
The second section "From Europe to Mexico" chronicles his journeys from 1955 to 1967, including his 1958 marriage to Mercedes Barcha and the birth of his two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
García Márquez during this time traveled to Geneva and Rome, where he began his foray into experimental cinematography. He wrote the novella "No One Writes to the Colonel" while living in Paris. The 1961 book was published the same year the author and his family moved to Mexico City, where García Márquez currently resides.
The final and largest stage "Many years later." covers the years 1967 to 2000, the period when the author rose to mainstream recognition and consolidated his place in the literary world with "Solitude" and by winning a Nobel Prize nearly 20 years later. He also penned the 1985 tragicomic drama "Love in the Time of Cholera," a complicated love story based on his parent's complex relationship.
Photographs capture García Márquez in a white Panama hat saluting his fans on his 80th birthday celebration in Cartegena; smiling with Poniatowska as she wraps him in a hug; and buried by reporters and surrounded by microphones.
García Márquez has continued to write in recent years. Following his 1999 diagnosis of lymphatic cancer, the author wrote "Living to Tell the Tale" in 2002, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography, as well as his 2008 novel "Memories of My Melancholy Whores."
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