Helen Hagemann’s Prose class on Friday, 3rd May @ Fremantle Arts Centre

Helen Hagemann’s Prose class on Friday, 3^rd May continues with Worldwide Short Fiction, looking at Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The class will read two short stories “The Ghosts of August” & “Light is Like Water” from Strange Pilgrims. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around “magic realism”.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez born March 6, 1927 is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the earliest remaining living recipient. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the theme of solitude.

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve loosely-related short stories published in 1992, although the stories that make up this collection were originally written during the seventies and eighties. Each of the stories touches on the theme of dislocation, and the strangeness of life in a foreign land, although quite what "foreign" means is one of Márquez's central questions in this book. He spent some years as a virtual exile from his native Colombia.

Novels: In Evil Hour (1962),  One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) – Novellas:    Leaf Storm (1955),  No One Writes to the Colonel (1961),  Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). - Short story collections: Eyes of a Blue Dog (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), the Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1978), Collected Stories (1984) & Strange Pilgrims (1993) - Non-fiction: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970), The Solitude of Latin America (1982), The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza), Clandestine in Chile (1986),  News of a Kidnapping (1996), A Country for Children (1998),  Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

The Ghosts of August

A family vacationing in Tuscany decides to spend the night in a castle owned by a friend. The builder of the castle, Ludovico, a renaissance nobleman, killed his bride in bed, before setting his dogs upon himself. The family, disregarding this as a ghost tale, goes to sleep in a guest room, only to awake in bedchamber of Ludovico, with fresh blood on the sheets and a scent of fresh strawberries in the air.

Light is Like Water

Two young boys ask for a boat in return for their good grades. When their parents finally buy them the rowboat, they break the light bulbs in their home and the light comes flowing out like water. They use the light to navigate around their home every Wednesday, and invite their friends to go sailing with them as well. The boys friends end up drowning in the light.