LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
By Gabriel García Marquez: Knopf, New York, 2002 (Spanish language edition), 592 pp., $25“I am Garcia Marquez ... just a writer.” With this humble self-description the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most important figures of Latin American literature, opens his latest work Living to Tell the Tale.In this narrative of his own life, the author confirms that his instinct to be a writer — to observe, to create, to invent — is an innate and inevitable motivation to relate the experiences of a life that is both unique and quintessentially Colombian and Latin.
The universal and transcendental profile of Garcia Marquez in modern fiction ensures that the publication of his personal history will be a notable event. The basic facts of his life are already well-known, and contrast ironically with the imaginary worlds of his creation. He was born on March 5, 1927. He currently lives in Mexico. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 after having authored One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, News of a Kidnapping,as well as other novels and tales. The enormously productive author adds, “and also seventy-five movie reviews, six hundred editorials, news items either signed or not signed every three days, and at least eighty stories, some signed and some others anonymous.” A large part of this impressive output appeared in the “Sunday Magazine” of the Colombian daily newspaper “El Espectador” (The Spectator), between 1952 and 1956.
Garcia Marquez says that he writes to avoid death. This is now, more than ever, the case as he is battling lymphatic cancer which requires treatment in Los Angeles every three months. His life is divided into two parts, the second beginning at the age of 23 when he began his journalistic career. From this point, his narrative moves in two directions, toward the future and back to his earliest memories. He speaks unapologetically of the sources of inspiration for his work. He vents his feelings of nostalgia for his infant years when poverty was the constant companion of a family of 11 children. And with severe honesty he reveals his dissatisfaction with each of his literary works, manifesting both his perfectionism and his struggle to develop a literary style.
In the final analysis, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is wrong when he says that he is “... just a writer.” He is a multifaceted artist, poet, musician, story teller, novelist, movie critic and journalist. He is an outstanding commentator on Colombia’s political history. He is a reader addicted to the classics, particularly the works of William Faulkner, Andre Gide, Garcia Lorca, Dostoyevsky and Sophocles. And he surprises us here with the confession that he had great difficulty learning to read as a child. He reaffirms his remarkable sympathy with women, especially with the women in his family whom he identifies as being of great character and tender hearts and to whom he attributes his own character and way of thinking.
Reading Living to Tell the Tale,one feels shipwrecked in the deep ocean of Garcia Marquez’ memory, as he recalls his trials, his longings and his uncertainties. It would appear that he has been writing his personal history his entire life, and only now has chosen to set it to paper. His epic style suggests fictional narrative. One could say that he is honest, but extremely subtle.
The most notable and incredible characteristic of this work is the profound nature of his memory and the rich detail with which he recapitulates events that occurred and things that were said long ago, probably not preserving any exactitude of event or expression, but rather preserving the sense and importance of the event. In this way, his memory becomes a literary resource and prompts him to recognize in the prologue that “Life is not what we experience, it is what we remember and how we remember in order to retell it.”
This great author now lives in voluntary exile in Mexico City. As a Colombian, I must note that it is difficult to ignore that his descriptions of every aspect of life in the country of our birth are pervaded with the dramatic violence that has profoundly and heartlessly damaged his generation and mine, and his recollections are filtered through an overwhelming nostalgia for a country to which, for unacceptable but justifiable reasons, it is impossible to return.
— Translated by John J. Ketterer
Giovanna Minotta, a native of Colombia, is the founder and executive director of Be Latino, a non-profit organization created to and aid and support the Hispanic community in Calhoun County. John J. Ketterer, director of the International House at Jacksonville State University, worked 17 years in education for the U.S. State Department in Latin America.
Editor's note: Vivir Para Contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), is currently available in Spanish. The English translation of the book is due out this fall.
