Living to Tell the Tale

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For several years García Márquez has been fighting cancer. This struggle has made it hard for him to continue creating his imaginary worlds - the English version of his last novel, Of Love and Other Demons, dates from 1995. Instead, his efforts have gone almost exclusively into the search for the lived reality behind the fiction: the somewhat ominously titled Living to Tell the Tale is the first volume of three he has planned. Gabriel José de la Concordia Garcí­a Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Garcí­a Márquez, familiarly known as "Gabo" in his native country, was considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. You say that so as not to mortify me," she said. "But even from a distance anybody can see the state you're in. So bad I didn't even recognize you when I saw you in the bookstore." This memoir may not win over those who have resisted being persuaded that Mr García Márquez is a great, rather than a very good, writer. His style is one of much poetry but sometimes less meaning than meets the eye (.....) But most readers will not mind. They will simply enjoy the anecdotes and the prose of a master of the narrative art and of the Spanish language." - The Economist

As we follow the struggles of the emerging writer, it also becomes clearer just what García Márquez means by that seemingly strange term, "solitude", that is present in all of his books. Despite the teeming life of the fiction, it is plain that Colombia, and to an even greater extent his tiny home town of Aracataca, is almost completely cut off from events taking place in the world outside. Much of Vivir para contarla reads like a gloss on much of García Márquez's fiction, and it's amusing to read about the sources for all sorts of his later fictional episodes and characters.)Another one of his novels, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), or Love in the Time of Cholera, drew a large global audience as well. The work was partially based on his parents' courtship and was adapted into a 2007 film starring Javier Bardem. García Márquez wrote seven novels during his life, with additional titles that include El general en su laberinto (1989), or The General in His Labyrinth, and Del amor y otros demonios (1994), or Of Love and Other Demons.

Gabriel García Márquez's experiences and his family colour much of his fiction, but part of García Márquez's great talent is how he takes fact and recreates it as fiction. Quan organised an extended family holiday to her birthplace in 2012. Eighteen people, including her husband and their daughter, who had never been to Vietnam, travelled around the city she knew as Saigon in a minibus. She said that by the time the visit was over she knew she belonged in London more than Vietnam, even if that was her history. But she suspected her father felt differently.

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Only then did I understand the uproar of the previous night, and I was very shaken by the idea that someone would have thrown my grandfather into the swamp. He can imagine practically nothing else, and knows his law-studies won't bear fruit, pursuing them merely to pelase his family while he writes -- and reads and read and reads. He found literary-minded friends all along the way too (Álvaro Mutis, in particular, came to be a close friend), and he also found a great deal of encouragement.

What is the tone in which García Márquez recounts his life? How intimate is his relationship with the reader? What is his own attitude toward his younger self? Others among the Wellpark refugees said they regularly found themselves in fights with racists at school or on the streets of the council estates where they lived. Some of the adults struggled with a new language and found only irregular work far below the professional positions they had once held. But, in time, their children thrived. García Márquez writes, “I needed this old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Cataca was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them the deeper they sank” [p. 70]. He suggests that nostalgia does not play a significant role in his own life. How important is the concept of nostalgia to his fiction? What is the difference between nostalgia and the creative mining of memory? The only way to get to Aracataca from Barranquilla was by dilapidated motor launch through a narrow channel excavated by slave labor during colonial times, and then across the ciénaga, a vast swamp of muddy, desolate water, to the mysterious town that was also called Ciénaga. There you took the daily train that had started out as the best in the country and traveled the last stretch of the journey through immense banana plantations, making many pointless stops at hot, dusty villages and deserted stations. This was the trip my mother and I began at seven in the evening on Saturday, February 19, 1950 --- the eve of Carnival --- in an unseasonable rainstorm and with thirty-two pesos that would be just enough to get us home if the house was not sold for the amount she had anticipated.

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Don't doubt it for a second, Colonel. What they wanted to do with you was throw you into the water."

García Márquez, whose splendid memoir of his first three decades, Living to Tell the Tale, is a swoon of swans" - John Leonard, Harper's

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The child Gabriel has memories that could not have taken place, which gives him “a bad name in the house for having intrauterine memories and premonitory dreams” [p. 70]. What is the role of prophecies, dreams, and irrational fears in the story of García Márquez’s life? Vivir para contarla (now translated as Living to Tell the Tale) offers a wonderful glimpse of much that inspired and formed his fiction.