Today

I want to write about an author who wrote a very striking story, which we read in Spanish class - Gabriel Garca Mrquez. Hes from Colombia, born in 1927, who wrote world famous books, such as One hundred years of solitude and Love in the time of cholera. His novel, One hundred years of solitude, sold more than eight thousand copies in the Mirst week! In 1982 Marquez was awarded the Nobel prize in literature. In 2009 he told the newspaper The Guardian that he was still working, but that his job wasnt to publish as much as to keep on writing. But still, his last work was in 2004. In July his brother told the same newspaper that he had ofMicially stopped working because of dementia, an illness that ran in their family. Today hes 85 years old and in addition to living with this, he has also survived lymphatic cancer. The book by Marquez we read in class is the story of a man who is a drifter on a life raft for ten days without food or water, was proclaimed a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, made rich through publicity, and then spurned by the government and forgotten for all time. The novel is called Diary of a shipwrecked sailor, and its one of the most unbelievable novels Ive ever read. The hero, Luis Alejandro Velasco, has seen and felt what we imagine in our nightmares, or what we see in horror movies, like shark Mins making circles around his boat. The hardest part for me, reading it, wasnt the language, but the fact that I was incapable of believing it.