Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

Overview

The first full and authorized biography of the 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature--the most popular international novelist of the last fifty years.

Over the course of the nearly two decades Gerald Martin gave to the research and writing of this masterly biography, he not only spent many hours in conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself but also interviewed more than three hundred others, including Garcia Marquez's wife and sons, mother and siblings, literary agent and translators; Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alvaro Mutis, among other writers; Fidel Castro and Felipe Gonzalez, among other political figures; his closest friends as well as those who consider themselves his detractors. The result is a revelation of both the writer and the man.

Garcia Marquez's story is a remarkable one. Born in 1927, raised by grandparents and a clutch of aunts in a small backwater town in Colombia, the shy, intelligent boy matured into a reserved young man, first working as a provincial journalist and later as a foreign correspondent, whose years of obscurity came to an end when, at the age of forty, he published the novel entitled Cien anos de soledad--One Hundred Years of Solitude. Within months, the book had garnered spectacular international acclaim, the author hailed as the standard-bearer of a new literature: magical realism. Eight years later, in 1975, he published The Autumn of the Patriarch, and, in 1981, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, each novel rapturously received by critics and readers alike. With his books read by millions around the world, he had become a man of wealth and influence. Yet, for all his fame, he never lost touch with his roots: though he had lived outside of Colombia since 1955--in Barcelona, Mexico City, Paris--his Nobel Prize was celebrated by Colombians from all walks of life who thought, and still think, of "Gabo" as their own. More books followed, both fiction (Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in his Labyrinth, Memories of My Melancholy Whores) and nonfiction (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, News of a Kidnapping, Living to Tell the Tale). But Garcia Marquez's renown and passion have continued to combine, as well, in a fervent, unflagging, and often controversial political and social activism.

While chronicling the particulars of the life, Martin also considers the overarching issues: the tension between Garcia Marquez's celebrity and his quest for literary quality, and between his politics and his writing; the seductions of power, solitude, and love. He explores the contrast between the exuberance of the writer's Caribbean background and the authoritarianism of highland Bogota, showing us how these differences are manifest in his writing and in the very shape his life has taken. He explores the melding of experience and imagination in Garcia Marquez's fiction, and he examines the writer's reasons for--and the public's reaction to--his turning away in the 1980s from the magical realism that had brought him international renown, toward the greater simplicity that would mark his work beginning with Love in the Time of Cholera.

Gerald Martin has written a superb biography: richly illuminating, as gripping as any of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's powerful journalism, as enthralling as any of his acclaimed and beloved fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Martin's control of his prodigious material in this first authorized biography of the great Colombian novelist Garcia Marquez is astonishing. Martin (Journeys Through the Labyrinth) writes with a novelist's momentum. His descriptions of Garcia Marquez's hometown, Aracataca (fictionalized as Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude), are atmospheric without being cloying; he conducts literary exegesis deftly, like a detective hunting for clues. From isolated youth to shabby college man in thrall to Kafka and Woolf, the "sexual reprobate" and the Nobel Prize laureate, grounded by his marriage and community of fellow writers and friends, and by turns publicly aloof and loquacious, Garcia Marquez seems to be many different men, but his biographer handles the contradictions with finesse. Almost entirely laudatory, the biography addresses the controversies-which generally orbit the politicized Garcia Marquez -gingerly if at all, and renders his off-putting traits endearing. Martin has come to praise Garcia Marquez-whom he regards as the one writer who has been as artistically influential as the early modernists (in pioneering magical realism, now a staple in fiction from the developing world) and positively Dickensian in his popular appeal. 16 pages of photos, 3 maps. (May 20)

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Author Information

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Additional Info

Imprint

Knopf

Filesize

7.65 MB

Number of Pages

672

eBook ISBN

9780307272003