Gabriel García Márquez bio dishes a wealth of insider info

"Gabriel García Márquez: A Life," by Gerald Martin

Knopf, 642 pp., $37.50

This is a useful biography of a great writer — but it's not a great biography.

If you're a passionate admirer of the work of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, as I am, "Gabriel García Márquez: A Life" will provide you with a wealth of information — especially about his early years — that you won't find elsewhere.

Biographer Gerald Martin draws sharp portraits of García Márquez's grandparents who raised him until he was 10 years old; his feckless quack of a father who wanted his son to be a lawyer; his long-suffering mother whose quirky way with a phrase clearly influenced her son's writing, especially his dialogue; and Spanish actress Tachia Quintana, an early paramour when he was a struggling writer in 1950s Paris.

Martin identifies the source materials of the author's novels, which were often conceived and drafted in an order strikingly different from their order of publication. Case in point: García Márquez was working on a prototype of his 1967 masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (his fifth book), as early as the late 1940s.

Martin is good on the development of García Márquez's "magic realist" style and its accompanying sense of humor. He's informative, as well, on the writer's leftist politics, his controversial friendship with Fidel Castro and the continual, deadly unrest in Colombia that prompted him to live in exile from his native country for much of his adult life.

There are lively cameo appearances by García Márquez's literary peers, including writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda and Alvaro Mutis. Martin also makes it clear that García Márquez is famous in Latin America in a way that no writer of literary fiction is in the U.S. His every move or utterance is covered in the press. His appearances anywhere are guaranteed to draw a crowd that can number in the thousands.

Most strikingly, the book immerses you, fully and disorientingly, in a Latin American world perspective that sees the United States as an unpredictable, bullying gremlin to the north and Europe as a sophisticated overseas cousin whose attention can't adequately be captured by her South American admirers.

But — and you're hearing a big "but" here — Martin's book has problems, some stemming from writing about a still-living author, some to do with the book's curious omissions, and some to do with Martin's prose, which tends toward overstatement.

The profusion of García Márquez's political activities results in a welter of names unfamiliar to the average North American reader: a salutary lesson, perhaps. But this is a book aimed at English-speaking audiences and the omission of any input from García Márquez's gifted American translators, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman — who must surely have had some revealing contact with the man — seems odd.

There's a lot of information on the author's involvement with the Latin American film scene. But two terrific films made from his scripts, "Miracle in Rome" and "The Summer of Miss Forbes" (one of German actress Hanna Schygulla's finest roles), get no mention. The history of García Márquez's visa problems with the U.S. remains murky. His siblings are simply a blur on the page (admittedly there are 10 of them, plus 4 illegitimate half-siblings). Martin's assessments of individual novels — a subjective matter, of course — will strike some readers as wildly off-base.

Martin clearly came up against a brick wall in some instances. Why did Vargas Llosa punch out García Márquez in 1976? No one's talking. Why did García Márquez's filmmaker son not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony for his father in 1982? That's private.

Fair enough. Even if he doesn't penetrate deeply, Martin does tellingly alight on the most striking contradiction at play in García Márquez: the tension between his common-man sympathies and his "hobnobbing" with political power figures (including dictators) and choice billionaires of the Western Hemisphere (Carlos Slim, for one).

Final verdict: "Gabriel García Márquez: A Life" is, for now, the go-to book for the writer's English-speaking audience — despite its shortcomings.

Michael Upchurch is The Seattle Times arts writer: mupchurch@seattletimes.com