Gabriel Garcia Marquez Birth Anniversary: 'One Hundred Years Of Solitude' Writer Celebrated By Google Doodle

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was born on March 6, 1927, would have celebrated his 91st birthday today. Google has celebrated the nobel prize winning author by having a doodle dedicated to him. The doodle has tried to recreate the fictional city of Macondo, the magical city which was brought to life by the Colombian author, journalist, and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America) in his book, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. The book is considered by readers and critics alike as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

The writer was born in Aracataca, Colombia, and 'Gabo' as he was fondly known in the Latin American world, is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He had a long literary career, and penned over 25 books, transporting readers into a world of magical realism where the readers find themselves in the lush, humid tropics and where, as Garcia Marquez wrote in One Hundred Years of Solitude, "Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice". In his book, "The earth is round, like an orange." He was a writer who could 'chronicle a death foretold' and 'narrate love in the times of cholera.' It is because of lines like these and the plots that he incorporates them into, that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is considered the master of the literary genre which has come to be known as magic realism. A genre where magic guides reality to complete itself.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez started as a journalist and one of his best known works of non-fiction is 'News of a Kidnapping' which is an accurate tale of the times it was written in. Google has mentioned that "We celebrate the 91st birthday of a cultural icon whose star continues to shine brightly over the literary and journalistic worlds of Latin America and beyond." It indeed does.

Five Great Quotes From Book 'One Hundred Years Of Solitude' Written By Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

1.  “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

2. “He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

3. “Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.”

4. “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

5. “He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”

Among many of his notable works are the novels, "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "The Autumn of the Patriarch", "Love in the Time of Cholera", "Chronicle of a Death Foretold".

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982 was awarded to Gabriel García Márquez "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". We couldn't agree more.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 06, 2018 09:18 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).