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Marquez conquers US revulsion for dollars
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-08-11 14:57
The Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the lion of the Latin
American literary left who once celebrated his being banned from the US with a
fireworks party, has signed up with his first Hollywood studio to earn a "family
pension".
The Nobel
prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez [file
photo] | Garcia Marquez, 76, who is fighting
lymphatic cancer, overcame anti-American scruples to let a Los Angeles company
produce a big-budget version of Love in the Time of Cholera , a surreal romance
based on his parents' troubled courtship.
He will receive ￡1.7 million. Garcia Marquez, a confidant of the Cuban leader
Fidel Castro, says he took "the Yankee dollar" to secure a comfortable old age
for his wife Mercedes, with whom he fell in love half a century ago when she was
just 13, and their sons Gonzalo and Rodrigo.
Since the publication of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude ,
Garcia Marquez has earned a fortune from writing and teaching in his native
Colombia and in Mexico City. But a heavy investment in Cambio, a radical Mexican
political magazine, is said to have drained his assets, and he has told friends
he had to "rethink" his finances.
The master of the dream-like style known as magical realism lives in a
luxurious house in Mexico City. Yet he remains haunted by his impoverished past
as a left-wing journalist in Bogota, when he bought food with second-hand beer
bottles. Garcia Marquez channelled his colourful past, including formative years
living in a brothel, into bestselling books that influenced younger authors such
as Salman Rushdie.
But he has not been prolific — when he won the Noble prize for literature in
1982 the writer John Updike said he had never known anyone achieve so much with
so little published. Although he funded a film school in Havana that was visited
by the director Steven Spielberg, he spurned attempts to turn his books into
Hollywood blockbusters.
The last person to try and fail was Harvey Weinstein, the boss of
Miramax.
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