Hometown celebrates 80th of long-gone author

BOGOTA, Colombia – Colombia celebrated the 80th birthday of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Tuesday with a vow to rebuild the author’s childhood home in the banana-producing town of Aracataca and convert it into a museum.

The government pledged $500,000 to reconstruct the home where the author drew inspiration for his trademark magical realism literary style that later became a much-emulated genre in itself.

According to his 2003 autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale,” it was on the patio of his thatch-roofed childhood home that the young Garcia Marquez eavesdropped on his grandmother and aunts, whose stories of ghosts visiting in the night and opera-singing parrots would later pepper much of his literature, including his award-winning “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Culture Minister Elvira Cuervo de Jaramillo said she hopes the reconstruction of the home – which has been approved by Garcia Marquez – would draw as many literary pilgrims to Aracataca as Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

“The importance of this home to the work of Garcia Marquez is that the original title of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was going to be called ‘La Casa,”’ she said.

The author’s masterwork has sold more than 30 million copies in translated editions worldwide.

Although Garcia Marquez left Aracataca when he was 9, the town’s 53,000 residents awoke Tuesday to the sound of 80 cannon blasts. The town, which is located about 420 miles north of Bogota near the Caribbean coast, has hosted celebrations with public readings and accordion-heavy vallenato music since Saturday.

“In spite of our limited resources, we were still able to organize a mass, popular celebration,” said Rafael Dario Jimenez, Aracataca’s culture secretary.

It was unclear where Garcia Marquez, who has lived in Mexico City for decades, was celebrating his birthday. Local media reported that the author was in Cuba, where he is a frequent guest of fellow octogenarian and ailing leader Fidel Castro.

Aracataca has been trying to capitalize on growing interest in the author’s birthplace to create much-needed jobs and jump-start a nascent tourism industry. Last year, residents voted in a referendum to change the town’s name to Macondo – the fictional universe where “One Hundred Years” takes place – but the results were invalidated because of low voter turnout.

In Madrid, politicians, actors and writers held a marathon reading Monday of “One Hundred Years,” which is celebrating its 40th anniversary of publication this year.

A Hollywood production of the author’s best-selling novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” filmed in Cartagena, Colombia, by British director Mike Newell, is scheduled to be released this year.