“We have to do more things in our culture than American writers do in theirs. They can have more time for themselves and for their writing, whereas we have social demands,” Carlos Fuentes once said.

He explained: “Pablo Neruda used to say that every Latin American writer goes around dragging a heavy body, the body of his people, of his past, of his national history. We have to assimilate the enormous weight of our past so we will not forget what gives us life. If you forget your past, you die.”

That duty is apparent in García Márquez's novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” which he described as a “poem on the solitude of power.” It is made up of the breathless and desperate sentences of a fictional ruthless Latin American dictator who goes unnamed, who nonetheless conjures forth many names: Pinilla, Trujillio, Franco, and too many more.

The abject loneliness of the cruel general, like the deathbed narrations of Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz or the aloofness of Mahfouz’s Gebelawi, captures the emptiness of the internecine dictatorships that plagued his home during his lifetime. It’s a plague that unfortunately survived him.

I’m nowhere near the wordsmith García Márquez was, so I will close with my favorite sentences of his:

“In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him, but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

For the man revered by millions as Gabo, life was what mattered, and I hope that his last thoughts were nostalgic and not fearful. But I will still miss him.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.