Gabriel Garcia Marquez is suffering dementia, reports the BBC

BBC News reported today the brother of Gabriel Garcia Marquez says that the Colombian writer and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature is suffering from dementia:

Jaime Garcia Marquez told students at a lecture in the city of Cartagena that his brother, who is 85, phones him frequently to ask basic questions.

"He has problems with his memory. Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him," he said.

He says the author has stopped writing altogether.

The BBC's Arturo Wallace in Colombia said there have been rumours about Mr Garcia Marquez' memory problems.

Jaime Garcia Marquez, his younger brother, is the first family member to speak publicly about it.

Invited to talk about his relationship with Gabo, as the writer is affectionately known in Colombia, Jaime said he could not hold back from talking about his illness anymore.
 

"He is doing well physically, but he has been suffering from dementia for a long time," he said. "He still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had."

The 1967 masterpiece of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude, begins with the story of a family unable to care for their senile grandfather. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez currently lives in Mexico and has not made many public appearances in recent years.
 

His novels include Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and The General in His Labyrinth. His last published novel is Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

"Dementia runs in our family and he's now suffering the ravages prematurely due to the cancer that put him almost on the verge of death," his brother said, who was invited to talk about his relationship with the acclaimed author.

Marquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1990, which he called a "stroke of luck" because it gave the writer an opportunity to work on his autobiography. His 2003 memoir Living to Tell the Tale -- the first book in a projected trilogy -- told the story of the writer's life in Aracataca on the Caribbean coast of Colombia up to the age of 28. Fidel Castro (that sometime book-reviewer and political figure, who was a spectator to a 1948 political assassination melee along with Garcia Marquez) praises Living to Tell the Tale as "a work that conjures up nostalgia for the thunder at four in the afternoon, which was the time of lightning and magic."