Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.But at the height of his glory, the Colombian novelist was suffering from senile dementia and had stopped writing. His death would not put an end to his literary output, it had ceased much earlier. It had been known for a long time that there would be no sequel to “ Living to tell the tale”, the memoirs of the great writer .He had not published a single novel since “Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores” (2004, English translation 2005).His last days are practically life-in –death, his mind having gone blank. “The General in His Labyrinth”, another novel of his depicts the life of a broken and delirious Simon Bolivar. Bolivar’s vulnerability in his eyes did not diminish the Bolivian patriot’s mystique. Marquez will not write any more but remains the pillar of the Latin American Boom. It is he who makes the past three-plus decades of Latin American literature so memorable. His legacy will extend far into the future. Two generations of disciples will follow in his footsteps. And the focus will be projected back to his predecessors like Jorge Luis Borges, far beyond the borders of a Spanish speaking readership. Incidentally, one of Marquez’s novels has been translated into Bengali by former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee .
Marquez’s crowning achievement is that his books do not go into oblivion, unlike those of his fellow Nobel Laureate novelist Mario Kangas Llosa. He will remain an icon to the whole world like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whether Marxist or not.
