Google Honors Gabriel Garcia Marquez With Colorful Daily Doodle
Images via Matthew Cruickshank/Google, Hulton Archive/Getty Books News Gabriel Garcia Marquez
On what would’ve been Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 91st birthday, the iconic Colombian author is being honored by Google in a colorful Daily Doodle. The search engine illustrates in its Doodle an animated city of Macondo, a town nestled deep in the Amazon jungle, brought to life by Garcia Marquez in his book One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Doodle was created by animator and artist Matthew Cruickshank.
Known as “Gabo” throughout Latin America, the prolific writer, born in Aracataca, Colombia, was a staple among Spanish-speaking novelists of the 20th century. With a literary career defined by realist prose and political activism, Garcia Marquez dominated the Spanish language, writing over 25 books, including Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
In 1982, Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels and short stories, which captivated readers’ minds by combining magical realism with an accurate reflection of the South American continent’s problems. He died at his home in Mexico City in 2014, at the age of 87.
One Hundred Years of Solitude was said to be inspired by Colombian vallenato songs. In turn, Rolling Stone revealed in 2016 that the novelist inspired the Tarsem Singh-directed music video for R.E.M.’s “Losing my Religion.” The music video’s director told the magazine:
There’s a story by Gabriel García Márquez called “A Very Old Man With [Enormous] Wings” in which this freak angel arrives and nobody knows quite what to do with it. So it’s that story, told abstractly through the style of these guys called Pierre et Gilles, who are these iconic gay photographers that take how Indians do their gods and goddesses, then they do that to the Western gods.
Watch the Garcia Marquez-inspired music video below. Then, revisit Paste’s 2005 review of Garcia Marquez’s last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, here, and 10 of our favorite romantic quotes from his work here.
You can learn more about today’s Google Doodle here.