Living to Tell the Tale

by Edith Grossman; Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's interview with the Paris Review he said, "What I would really like to do is write a piece of journalism that is completely true and real but that sounds as fantastic as ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE." In his lush and often fantastical memoir LIVING TO TELL THE TALE (intended to be the first of a trilogy) he has perhaps accomplished this rare feat of capturing the utter unreality of life. His descriptions of his family, and his childhood in the small Colombian town of Aracataca are as full of the zestfully surreal details as his acclaimed novels: dry hurricanes, plagues of locusts, an aunt diligently sewing her own shroud and completing it on the day of her death, his mother's long-suffering love for Garcia Marquez's eventual father (the basis for LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA). Garcia Marquez, with the dreamy sensuality of Proust, conjures a people living alongside ghosts and portents, and a country wracked by the Kafkaesque rules of governments and corporations. Against this marvelous background, Garcia Marquez recounts his youth, his love-affair with literature, and his early forays into journalism and short-fiction. The book ends before ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE takes the world by storm, forever changing the possibilities of literature, but readers will have already witnessed the jungle crucible out of which this masterpiece and its author were formed.

Editions of Living to Tell the Tale

ISBN

9781400041343

Binding/Format

Hardcover

Publisher

Alfred a Knopf Inc

Date

2003

Price

$1.00

Used, Very Good

Publisher Notes

In this long-awaited first volume of a planned trilogy, the most acclaimed and revered living Nobel laureate begins to tell us the story of his life.

Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the shape, the quality, and the vividness of a conversation with the reader—a tale of people, places, and events as they occur to him: the colorful stories of his eccentric family members; the great influence of his mother and maternal grandfather; his consuming career in journalism, and the friends and mentors who encouraged him; the myths and mysteries of his beloved Colombia; personal details, undisclosed until now, that would appear later, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction; and, above all, his fervent desire to become a writer. And, as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at the heart of a life—in this instance, his own.

Living to Tell the Tale is a radiant, powerful, and beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel García Márquez as a writer and as a man.

Media Reviews

"[R]eminds us that what was so fantastical in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is in fact a reasonable description of Colombia, where ghosts are still central to workaday life and the successor to the civil war depicted in the novel rages to this very day...[A] richly reported, wonderfully detailed story that brings the artist as a young man vividly into focus and introduces the people and places he drew up on to create his novels."

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