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Marquez conquers US revulsion for dollars
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-08-11 14:57

The Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the lion of the Latin American literary left who once celebrated his being banned from the US with a fireworks party, has signed up with his first Hollywood studio to earn a "family pension".


The Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez [file photo]
Garcia Marquez, 76, who is fighting lymphatic cancer, overcame anti-American scruples to let a Los Angeles company produce a big-budget version of Love in the Time of Cholera , a surreal romance based on his parents' troubled courtship.

He will receive £1.7 million. Garcia Marquez, a confidant of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, says he took "the Yankee dollar" to secure a comfortable old age for his wife Mercedes, with whom he fell in love half a century ago when she was just 13, and their sons Gonzalo and Rodrigo.

Since the publication of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude , Garcia Marquez has earned a fortune from writing and teaching in his native Colombia and in Mexico City. But a heavy investment in Cambio, a radical Mexican political magazine, is said to have drained his assets, and he has told friends he had to "rethink" his finances.

The master of the dream-like style known as magical realism lives in a luxurious house in Mexico City. Yet he remains haunted by his impoverished past as a left-wing journalist in Bogota, when he bought food with second-hand beer bottles. Garcia Marquez channelled his colourful past, including formative years living in a brothel, into bestselling books that influenced younger authors such as Salman Rushdie.

But he has not been prolific — when he won the Noble prize for literature in 1982 the writer John Updike said he had never known anyone achieve so much with so little published. Although he funded a film school in Havana that was visited by the director Steven Spielberg, he spurned attempts to turn his books into Hollywood blockbusters.

The last person to try and fail was Harvey Weinstein, the boss of Miramax.



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