In the Works of García Márquez, Finding a Link to Home

Rodrigo Garcia/FNPI, via Associated PressGabriel García Márquez in 1972.

Under the fluorescent lights of a check-cashing store in Jackson Heights, Queens, a man recited the opening lines of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Spanish, on Thursday night.

“Of course I remember them,” said the man, Alexander Caicedo, 39, a waiter who had just wired money to Colombia, where he first read the book in high school. “It’s been 22 years since I graduated, but I remember. It’s something innate for us, it’s ours.”

The death of the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, at 87, set off a flurry of obituaries and appraisals on Thursday, which like a magical storm in one of the author’s books, seemed as if it might never end. In New York, Mr. García Márquez was remembered by friends, writers and scholars, but most of all, it seems, by his Latin American readers.

They included teachers and waiters, superintendents and shoe salesmen: those who had first encountered Mr. García Márquez’s work in village schoolhouses or libraries thousands of miles away from New York City, in places where “One Hundred Years of Solitude” â€" Latin America’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” â€" has been required reading for more than four decades.

In Jackson Heights, a Colombian enclave, some recited the book’s opening passage over beers.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Others declared their favorite books. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” said a woman behind the counter at a cantina on Roosevelt Avenue. “Love in the Time of Cholera,” a young woman said as she sliced into a chicken breast at a restaurant down the street.

“No One Writes to the Colonel,” said Guillermo Angarita, 69, who took off his horn-rimmed glasses and wiped away tears at a bar called Hairo’s. “I read them all,” said Mr. Angarita, a maintenance worker.

Mr. Angarita moved to Brooklyn from Colombia in the late 1960s, just after the publication of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in Spanish. For readers like him, Mr. García Márquez’s books were a visceral connection to Colombia, during a time when photographs came months apart, and letters got lost in the mail.

For other readers from Latin America, his themes were universal: violence and war, the separations that follow. “After the difficult times, there was always a reason to go on,” said Raymundo Severian, of Mr. García Márquez’s works. Mr. Severian, a 44-year-old from Mexico, was eating dinner in Jackson Heights with a group of fellow Amway vendors.

The author Francisco Goldman, who lives in Brooklyn, said no writer had touched more lives in Latin America than Gabo, as Mr. García Márquez was affectionately known there.

“So many people in Latin America discovered literature through reading,” him, Mr. Goldman said, “people who maybe only read a couple of books in their lives.”

He continued, laughing, “You’d be at a bordello and the woman would have one book by her bed and it would be Gabo’s. And they would have read it.”

One of New York City’s first Spanish-language bookstores was called Macondo, after the fictional village in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Jaime Manrique, a Colombian novelist, said the bookshop, on 14th Street in Manhattan, was important to him as he began writing, for the scene it provided and for its name. “It was important to see that Colombia existed, in so many places, because of his work,” he said of Mr. García Márquez.

Macondo was closed in 2007, but in recent years the Spanish-language literary scene has grown. Every month, as many as 50 people crowd into McNally Jackson Books in SoHo for a book club conducted entirely in Spanish. Javier Molea, a bookseller from Uruguay who runs the club, said its members are bilingual - Latin Americans but also people who speak Spanish as a second language.

“This isn’t the end of an era,” he said.

Edith Grossman, who lives in New York and is regarded as one of the foremost translators of Latin American fiction, recalled a conversation she had on Thursday. “Some friends called me when they heard he had died,” said Ms. Grossman, who has translated “Love in the Time of Cholera” and other works by Mr. García Márquez. Her friends had gone to a hardware store in Manhattan, she said, and “There was a young kid in the store, working. He mentioned Gabriel García Márquez had died and that they really had to read his work, it was really good.”

Carlos Labbé, a Chilean writer who spent the evening gathered with other writers in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, compared the work of Mr. García Márquez to the achievement of the epic poets. “He rescued a rural world, a place outside civilization, and brought it to New York,” he said.

“No one else has done that, for us.”