MOSCOW, April 18 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova – Nobel-prize winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez animated the jungles of Latin America in his literature, Russian writer and television host Victor Erofeyev told RIA Novosti, commenting on Marquez's recent death.
“His energy animated the jungles of Latin America in his book, they were moving,” Erofeyev said. “And his energy revived literature at that time, when it was in a sort of decay.”
Marquez, a journalist and political activist, passed away at his home on Thursday in Mexico at the age of 87.
He had been admitted with pneumonia and dehydration to a Mexico City hospital in early April, but was dismissed several days ago after receiving antibiotic therapy.
“Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died,” family spokeswoman Fernanda Familiar wrote on Twitter, adding she felt “such deep sadness.”
“He was the light of a fading star,” Erofeyev told RIA Novosti. “One Hundred Years of Solitude became the dawn of his career,” he added.
The writer became synonymous with magical realism, a literary style that originated in Latin America in the 1960s. In 1982, Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” has sold some 50 million copies in over 25 languages.
“This power reached even the Soviet Union, where even through the modest translations of his book, the reader could feel all the eroticism and the desire of the heroes to live and thrive,” Erofeyev said, describing Marquez as a man with a God-given talent.
Erofeyev added that Marquez represented a “powerful phallic symbol which didn’t know where to enter.”
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos called Garcia Marquez “the greatest Colombian of all time.” He was widely known as “Gabo,” and seen as one of Spanish literature’s most popular writers.
