Near the start of Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (1967), the founding father of Macondo (the now famous fictional dusty town that is the epicentre of the Colombian's literary universe) teaches his children to read and write by exposing them to 'las maravillas del mundo': 'no sólo hasta donde le alcanzaban sus conocimientos, sino forzando a extremos increíbles los límites de su imaginación' (García Márquez, 1978: 21). This can be taken as a kind of model of how to write, but also how to read the very magical realist text that the reader is about to begin. Herein lie the energy and ambiguity that make García Márquez's writing so compelling. In this first great novel of what the West used to call the 'developing world', the reader is being exhorted to an act of political imagination, to abandon passivity and dare to invent a new kind of reality. At the same time, the suggestion is that literature can be no more than fiction and that any alternative reality is nothing but a fantasy. Hence, near the end of the novel, when the only person of the next generation to believe in the truth of the officially sanctioned yet hushed-up massacre of striking workers at a US-owned banana plantation (the key political moment of the narrative) asks his parish priest about the veracity of the episode, the priest wearily replies that: 'a mí me bastaría con estar seguro de que tú y yo existimos en este momento' (García Márquez, 1978: 354).

Nonetheless, despite the equivocal nature of some of García Márquez's pronouncements, his political drive was always of vital importance - if usually tinged with melancholy. In many ways, the key theme of his work and his vision of Latin American history is the way great dreams all too often end in disastrous failure. García Márquez's characters repeatedly re-enact this dilemma, echoing the fate of continental heroes like Simón Bolívar or Ernesto Che Guevara. Indeed the author's only real stab at a historical novel, El general en su laberito (1989), was a meditation on the shabby final days of a faded Bolívar whose American dream has apparently withered hopelessly away -echoing perhaps García Márquez's much later ambiguous assessment, despite his notorious friendship with Fidel Castro, of the former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez.

The highlights of García Márquez's life are well known: his brilliant career as a journalist, his intimate association with the Boom of the Latin American New Novel and the cult of Magical Realism, the 1982 Nobel Prize and the subsequent era of celebrity - and finally his iconization and slippage into old age. Ironically, following his apparent triumph over cancer, Gabo's partial autobiography of 2001 was defiantly entitled Vivir para contarla. The title calls to mind the ending of one of the author's most popular novels, often seen as a hugely optimistic celebration of amorous desire, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), when the aged Florentino Ariza pledges his love to Fermina Daza for the rest of their lives - 'toda la vida' (García Márquez, 1985: 473). What 'toda la vida' means to a man of seventy-six who has waited nearly fifty-four years for this moment remains uncertain. However, the key point is surely dignity. What is at the core of much of García Márquez's work is the sense of the unswerving endurance and resilience of the ordinary Latin American people as their social hopes repeatedly fell foul of grim reality. Yes, he was a global icon and a huge influence in literature (would the novels of, say, Salman Rushdie,John Irving, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy or Patrick Süskind exist without García Márquez?). But he also remained, as far as possible for one so famous, something of a man of the people. Some Colombians may have been disappointed that the first memorial service for the writer took place in Mexico rather than his homeland. However, this shows how Gabrial García Márquez became much more than just a novelist of Colombia, coming to be a voice for the Latin American pueblo and a beacon of imagination and independence for the world as a whole.

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