Islamabad:June 14:One of the main features of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing is his narrating the unheard and untold story of loser and vanquisher, said Assistant Professor Dr. Shaheena Ayub Bhatti while delivering a lecture on a Latin American literary masterpiece — ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marques, a Latin-American writer and Nobel Prize winner.
The lecture was arranged by the Faculty of Advanced Integrated Studies and Research (AIS&R) for students of MPhil English Literature at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML) here on Wednesday, says a press release.
Dr. Shaheena Ayub Bhatti told students that like many Latin American writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, known affectionately as Gabo, was a journalist and wrote on political issues. As Columbia was colonised by Spain, everything was recorded from the coloniser’s point of view. Garcia, while using the tool of magical realism, related stories, like many of his contemporaries, which were experienced, witnessed and narrated by the losers. He juxtaposed magic with reality to tell the facts, which were otherwise banned by colonial master.
She told students initially his novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was banned in America but now it is widely followed and read in US universities.
Explaining the novel, Dr. Bhatti said that the book signifies the 100-year history of Latin America, which witnessed long spells of civil war, civil disobedience, colonisation, subjugation and political tug of war. She said that the novel has been inextricably linked to a style of literature known as ‘magical realism’. Literature of this type is usually characterised by elements of the fantastic woven into the story with a deadpan sense of presentation. “The ‘magical realism’ expands the categories of the real so as to encompass myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena in nature or experience which ‘European realism’ excluded”. Marquez uses magical realism to blend reality and fantasy so that the distinction between the two erases, she added.The news.