Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is unable to write, his brother said recently, because of dementia cancer treatments. But a colleague has told the N.Y. Times that the author is no more impaired than the average 85-year-old. “I saw him in April,”  Jaime Abellos, the director of the Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation in Cartagena, Colombia, told the N.Y. Times . “He is a man of 85 with the normal signs of his age.”  That runs counter to the assessment of Marquez's decline put forward by his brother Jaime Garcia Marquez.

Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel laureate who died in Mexico City on Thursday, has been cremated and his ashes could be shared between two countries, according to Mexican media reports . The Colombian novelist spent five decades of his life in Mexico but never gave up his Colombian citizenship. On Friday, Colombia's ambassador to Mexico, Jose Gabriel Ortiz, told reporters gathered outside the late author's Mexico City home that part of his remains might return to Colombia.

One would think that out of two writers of the feature on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of them would have read his works. To assign the wonderful Fermina Daza the name Diaz, from "Love in the Time of Cholera," is insulting and uneducated. ELAINE BLYTH ANDERSON Santa Monica

Re "Literary master of magical realism," Obituary, April 18 A dogeared paperback edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" has traveled with me on countless adventure trips and rests within easy reach of my watercolors. I have traveled the world and drifted into my best creativity accompanied by the inestimable Marquez. When things get the better of me, or I feel the need of an interesting companion, I simply open "Cholera" or "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and slip into worlds only Marquez could imagine and only he could explain.

For the theme of this sprawling, surreal novel, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems to have chosen Cole Porter's admonition, "Let's contemplate l'amour in all its infinite variety." With the calm assurance of a master story- teller, Marquez allows the narrative to ramble among digressions and flashbacks without ever relaxing his grip on the reader's attention.

Twelve out of 64; the figure comes from the prologue to these short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is its theme and the occasion for a precious insight into the alternating ticktock of creation and nothingness that painfully advances a writer's clock. The prologue, in fact, is one of the best pieces in "Strange Pilgrims" and this is not a reflection on what follows, some of which is splendid.

"The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor," as the author left-handedly suggests in his preface, is not so much a book as a publishing event. Seeing that the author is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a man of brilliance and of masquerades, the message is not to be taken straight. To him, a publishing event seems to be a subject for opprobrium; yet who knows? The story itself is a reissue of a series of newspaper articles he wrote 30 years ago for El Espectador of Bogota.

In a port on the Caribbean, a colonial aristocrat dozes in a hammock outside his mansion while bats gradually drain his blood. Indoors, his wife lives in a haze of stench on a daily regimen of three antimony purges and six enemas. A pack of rabid monkeys invades a Mass at the cathedral. A beautiful Abyssinian slave, 6 feet, 7 inches tall and with perfect teeth, is auctioned off for her weight in gold.

The city, ancient, decaying, tropical, lies at the mouth of Colombia's Magdalena River. Weeds grow in the cracks of 17th-Century palaces; the sewers are open, and the corpses of victims of endemic cholera float downstream from the hinterland. It is a city "where flowers rusted and salt corroded."

More than 500 international writers, scientists, religious leaders, academics and artists have signed an open letter asking President Bush to stop outside interference in Nicaragua. They urged Bush to lift the U.S. trade embargo imposed four years ago, talk directly to Nicaraguan officials and not to meddle in regional peace efforts. Signers included American conductor Leonard Bernstein, actor Ed Asner, Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci and authors Carlos Fuentes, Graham Greene, Guenter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

It may be generations before we see another writer reach Gabriel Garcia Marquez's stature; he was so well-known and well-loved. His novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" became an international bestseller of previously unknown proportions. After he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982, he rubbed shoulders with world leaders, kept writing, and, in countries all over the globe, celebrated books. Now, with Garcia Marquez gone, his fans -- presidents, writers, and more -- have been sharing their appreciation for the man and his work.

Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been hospitalized in Mexico City, the Associated Press reports . The author, known colloquially as Gabo, is 87 years old. According to some news sources, Garcia Marquez has been hospitalized with pneumonia. His family has asked that no details of his condition be released. He last made a public appearance on March 6, his 87th birthday, outside his Mexico City home. The president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, wished Gabo "a speedy recovery" on his Twitter feed.

Gabriel García Márquez's “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” first published in 1967, is a novel set in a bygone era of Colombian history without much technology to speak of. Now the book itself is finally starting to enter the digital age. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is not yet available as an e-book. But now you can travel to the fictional Macondo in an audio book, from Blackstone Audio. The Ashland, Ore.-based company has acquired the unabridged audio rights to four works by García Márquez: “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” English translation by Gregory Rabassa; “Love in the Time of Cholera,” translated by Edith Grossman; “No One Writes to the Colonel,” translated by J. S. Bernstein; and “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” also translated by Edith Grossman.

Former President Clinton visited Colombia last week, meeting with President Juan Manuel Santos while visiting Cartagena, where Bogota Mayor Gustavo Petro showed him around the city in an electric taxi. Then Clinton took time out to visit with Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez , 86. Marquez has been said to be suffering from dementia. Last summer, his brother, Jaime Garcia Marquez, announced that cancer treatments the writer had undergone hastened a memory decline.

Ashbel Green, 84, a respected editor at Alfred A. Knopf who persuaded Gabriel Garcia Marquez to switch publishers, worked on Walter Cronkite's memoir and a foreign policy book by President George H.W. Bushand helped discover the crime classic "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," died Tuesday night. Green had been dining with his wife, Elizabeth Osha, near their home in Stonington, Conn., when he died, the publisher announced. The cause was not given. Green was praised by the New York Observer as "an exemplar of elegance, decency and seriousness.

Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is unable to write, his brother said recently, because of dementia cancer treatments. But a colleague has told the N.Y. Times that the author is no more impaired than the average 85-year-old. “I saw him in April,”  Jaime Abellos, the director of the Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation in Cartagena, Colombia, told the N.Y. Times . “He is a man of 85 with the normal signs of his age.”  That runs counter to the assessment of Marquez's decline put forward by his brother Jaime Garcia Marquez.

Since Gabriel Garcia Marquez first published "Love in the Time of Cholera" internationally in 1988, he is said to have declined, much like a character in one of his books, something on the order of 50 offers to turn the novel into a film. Part of his reluctance to fork over the story to Hollywood apparently stemmed from his misgivings about subjecting one the greatest Spanish-language novels of the 20th century to an English-language adaptation.