So, Gabriel García Márquez has passed on
I’d been thinking a lot about him lately; there was a Jeopardy question about his work not long ago, leading to a question about whether or not he was still living. I’ve also noticed a tendency for people to invoke “magical realism” as a term for “fantasy but I don’t want to be disrespected” lately as well (and I mean no disbelief that people are writing magical realism–just that things have been weird).
Another reason I’ve been thinking about GGM is because I’ve been thinking back to college, and a time when I felt alienated by literature. I’ve been thinking about signals that books/stories are for you or not, which deserves at least a post not written on a phone while I wait for traffic to clear so I can drive home on the fuel I have, or better yet, a roundup of thoughtful links. At any rate, when I was taking a world literature class–which I transferred into at the last minute, running from a very dry class on politics that I had misjudged in the course catalog–I read GGM for the first time, as well as some other interesting, perspective-shifting work. I was still at sea, and in many ways I still am, but I think I that class helped point me in the right direction again.
