DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS IFD CANELONES

Prof. Mag. María José Martínez

TASK 3

17 April 2014 Last updated at 20:10 GMT

At the Nobel Prize-giving
ceremony in 1982
1A. Look at the photograph. Do you know this famous
personality? What can you tell about him?
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1B. Read the following quotes. Which one belongs to this
writer?

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

“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

2. Read the following text and do the activities below:

Obituary: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The vivid prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez described a world as exotic as a Latin American carnival.
His backdrop was the poverty-stricken, and often violent world of his Colombian home where democracy never
really found roots.
His stories wove imaginary magical elements into real life and were often set in a fictional village called
Macondo.
A left-winger by conviction he was not slow to criticise the Colombian government and spent a great part of
his life in exile.
Garcia Marquez was born in the town of Aracataca, Colombia on 6 March 1927.
Shortly after he was born, his father became a pharmacist and his parents moved away. The young Marquez
was left in the care of his maternal grandparents.
Critical acclaim
His grandfather, a veteran of Colombia's Thousand Days' War and a liberal activist, gave him an awareness
of politics.
From his grandmother, Garcia Marquez learned of superstitions and folk tales. She spoke to him of dead
ancestors, ghosts and spirits dancing round the house, all in a deadpan style that he would later adopt for his
greatest novel.
Garcia Marquez went to a Jesuit college and began to study law, but soon broke off his studies to work as a
journalist.
In 1954, he was sent to Rome on a newspaper assignment, and since that time, lived mostly abroad, in Paris,
Venezuela, and finally Mexico City.
He always continued his work as a journalist, even when his fiction increased in popularity.
Facilitator
Heavily influenced by the work of William Faulkner, Garcia Marquez wrote his first novel at the age of 23
although it took seven years to find a publisher.
Published in 1955, Leaf Storm and his three subsequent novels received critical acclaim from the literary
establishment but did not reach the wide audience he would win with his later books.
 In 1965, the idea for the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him while he was driving to
Acapulco.
He turned the car, drove home and locked himself into his room with six packets of cigarettes a day for
company.
He emerged 18 months later to find his family $12,000 in debt. Fortunately, he had thirteen hundred pages of
phenomenal best-selling text in his hands.
The novel's first printing in Spanish sold out within a week, and during the next thirty years One Hundred Years
of Solitude sold more than twenty million copies and was translated into more than thirty languages.
The New York Times called it the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required
reading for the entire human race.
Reality
Following its publication, Garcia Marquez was asked to act as a facilitator in negotiations between the
Colombian government and a number of guerrilla organisations including Farc and ELN.
He also became friends with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a relationship that Garcia Marquez insisted was
based on books.
"Fidel is a very cultured man," he said in an interview. "When we're together we talk about literature."
In 1982 Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He received praise for the vibrancy of his
prose and the rich language he used to convey his overflowing imagination.
Some saw his work as deliberate exaggeration, a supernatural, mythical approach he effected to escape the
unrest of his country.
He said himself that "surrealism came from the reality of Latin America," and such works as The General in
his Labyrinth and The Autumn of the Patriarch illustrate his growing political opposition to the increasing
violence in Colombia.
Garcia Marquez's place in the ranks of literary masters was further assured by the publication of another best-
selling work, Love in the Time of Cholera in 1986.
In the story of two couples, the younger based on the love affair between his own parents.
The Mexican novelist, Carlos Macias, described Garcia Marquez as perhaps the best writer in Spanish since
Cervantes.
"He is one of those rare artists who succeed in chronicling, not only a nation's life, culture and history, but also
those of an entire continent."

SOURCE: www.bbc.com

2A. READ THE TEXT QUICKLY AND ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS

• What kind of text is this?

• What is its purpose?

• Where would you find it?

• When was it published?

• Where was it taken from?

 2B. READ THE TEXT AGAIN AND COMPLETE THE TABLE BELOW

DATE
BIRTH (place)
NEWSPAPER JOB (place)
FIRST NOVEL (name)
IDEA FOR FIRST CHAPTER OF (place, circumstances)
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF
SOLITUDE
AWARD (which)

2C. READ THE TEXT AGAIN AND ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS

• 1. What was the name of the fictional village where García Marquez’ stories took place?

• 2. Why did he live in exile?

• 3. What did he learn from his grandfather and from his grandmother?

• 4. Which author had an influence on his work?

• 5.How long did it take him to sell One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish?

• 6. Why did he receive the Nobel Prize for Literature?

• 7. Why are the Book of Genesis and Cervantes mentioned in relation to Garcia Marquez and his work?

3. UNDERLINE SEVEN ADJECTIVES IN THE TEXT AND WORK OUT THEIR MEANING FROM THE CONTEXT

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4. We have read quotes by famous writers. Find a quote in English by a famous writer and look for an
image that illustrates it, including three words or expressions connected. Share it in the following
collaborative board: http://linoit.com/users/mjmartinezmorosini/canvases/FAMOUS%20QUOTES