1. Gabriel Garcia Marques
“Death Constant Beyond Love”

2. Born in 1927.
Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
Best known for his novels, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”
Most of them express the theme of solitude.
Popularizing a literary style labeled as “magical realism”, mixture of fantasy and realism.

3. Magical realism Influenced by Kafka.
Interweaving of unlikely, even impossible events with recognizably real experiences and situations.
Distinguished from "fantastic literature“ and "sci-fi fantasy”.
Gives expression to the world-view of a rural people living in remote isolation from the modern developed world.
Acceptance of the fantastic as real.

4. Magical realism
Magical realism depends on the intermingling of real and fantastic worlds.
Blurring of real and unreal worlds.
Modernist method of using the imagination.
It provides the potential for many various interpretations. The technique leads to allegory.
It penetrates objective reality to reveal the mysterious and poetic qualities that underlie the daily lives of the people and communities it describes.

5. Magical realism
Materials for the fantastic: Rich, popular culture of his native, Caribbean-coastal Colombia, folk legends, and superstitions.

6. Main theme: distinction between the real and artificial. Who is real?
Who/what is artificial?
Artificial represented by dead and dying (Onesimo Sanchez): Paper Birds
Cardboard façade
Prop trees with felt leaves
Ocean liner of painted paper
Paper butterfly from the sheet of the calendar
Flying bank notes
The heart on the chest of Sanchez is a tattoo—one dimensional image in ink.

7. Political corruption: bribes, manipulation, exploitation of the powerless, offering of fantasy (Gingrich $2.50 gas), circus.
“We are here for the purpose of defeating nature” – with props!
Attempt to defeat death through love – death constant beyond love.
In the face of death man is left only with his solitude: “It’s good to be with someone when you’re so alone.”