Gabriel Gárcia Márquez
The 1982 Nobel laureate for literature, Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia and now lives in Mexico City. The author of the masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez is often cited as being a pioneer of "magical realism," a term which he disdains, and has been called by more than a few the inheritor of Borges's legacy. Although there may be some truth to this, I believe that though they share some things in common, their differences are much greater than their similarities. Still, it is impossible to deny the influence of Borges in García Márquez's work, where the fantastic mingles with the mundane in a very beautiful -- but matter-of-fact -- fashion. Both writers create characters soaked in the mysterious, characters whom often attempt to explore the infinite and the eternal from the labyrinths of their own solitude. Both also tend to include themselves in their works of fiction, translating their own identity into their narrative through the alchemy of their prose. Interestingly, the book that García Márquez credits as being his main literary inspiration is Kafka's Metamorphosis, which he read as a student -- in the Spanish translation by Borges.
Perhaps the main Borgesian "reference" or "influence"
in García Márquez's prose occurs in the inclusion of a rather
interesting character in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This
character, Melquíades, is a gypsy who visits the town of Macondo
early on in the novel, bringing magic, wonders, and books. It is also
Melquíades who chronicles the history -- and the future -- of Macondo,
meticulously penning the secrets of its cyclical nature in a cryptic code.
Although García Márquez has never made this explicit, it
is the belief of many that Melquíades represents Borges. Roberto
Gonzáles Echevarría puts it well in his essay, "Cien
años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive."