The Diplomat
The Instituto Cervantes in Paris received this past Thursday the donation of 306 copies from Gabriel García Márquez’s personal library from the Colombian writer’s family, made up of books that the author kept in his apartment in the French capital.
This legacy includes works by writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Roberto Bolaño, Álvaro Mutis, Horacio Quiroga, Juan Rulfo or Stefan Zweig, as well as titles such as ‘El Conde de Lucanor’ or a collection of ‘Clásicos Castellanos’ by Espasa Calpe that García Márquez requested from the literary agent Carmen Balcells, as well as translations into various languages of the novels of the Colombian novelist himself.
All these copies have become the property of the Instituto Cervantes and will be kept in a special conservation fund in the Octavio Paz Library in the Parisian center, according to the Spanish cultural diplomacy institution in a press release.
Present at the signing ceremony were Luis García Montero, director of the Instituto Cervantes; Gonzalo García Barcha, son of the Colombian author; José María Martínez, director of the Cervantes Institute in Paris, and Alfonso Prada, Colombian ambassador to France.
Gonzalo García Barcha explained that these books, which his father kept in the apartment on Rue de Montalembert, in the seventh district of Paris, were “up in the air” when they decided to sell the house. “It seemed a shame to lose these books that lived in a slightly conspiratorial place, but above all one of great joy. There we learned that culture is not the great theaters, nor the great cinemas, nor the great ceremonies, but something that is experienced at the table at home,” he declared.
For García Montero, this is an important donation because of the “value” of García Márquez in Spanish, a name that “always appears when talking about the importance of Hispanic culture,” for whom he felt “great admiration” for his literature and his work and whom he had the opportunity to meet.
