Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, passed away at the age of 86 on April 17, 2014. The world paused to remember the cultural giant (巨匠).
Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia, but he spent most of his adult life in Mexico City. As one of the most famous writers, he was widely regarded as "a giant of 20th-century literature". Garcia Marquez wrote in a style called "magical realism (魔幻现实主义)". In such works, people live a daily life in a certain period of time in history. But meanwhile, magical things happen to them.
Garcia Marquez is best known for his 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (《百年孤独》), which has sold about 50 million copies. It tells the tale of the small and isolated town of Macondo which was separated from the outside world—of its founding and its troubled history over a hundred years. The story is a metaphor (暗喻) for the development of Colombia since the 19th century. As Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said, Garcia Marquez wrote about "the very essence (精髓) of the Latin American being.