Details
Synopsis
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., This first volume of a planned trilogy is a portrait of Garcia Marquez's early life, beginning in the Colombian town of Aracataca and ending with his first trip abroad, when he was 29. During the course of these years, Garcia Marquez finds his vocation as a writer.
| Size | | Length: | 483 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 26.4 oz |
Industry 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."
New York Times Book Review - Brent Staples (11/16/2003)
"In a sense, this memoir is more fantastical than García Márquez's fiction....As the title playfully suggests, this memoir is just another tale. But there is no doubt it is brilliantly told."
Literary Review - Sebastian Shakespeare
"[LIVING TO TELL THE TALE's] most powerful sections read like one of [Garcia Marquez's] mesmerizing novels, transporting the reader to a Latin America haunted by the ghosts of history and shaped by the exigencies of its daunting geography, by its heat and jungles and febrile light."
(09/11/2003)
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