Book Review
Real magic: The remarkable life of Gabriel García Márquez, in his own words

By John Freeman
Special to The Seattle Times

	CALEB BACH / FROM THE BOOK JACKET
	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

Weighing in at nearly 500 pages and full of richly researched anecdotes from the writer's childhood in a small Colombian village, the book has all the weight and storytelling prowess of his two masterpieces, "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

The tale, as García Márquez aptly calls this book, begins in the 1950s, when García Márquez was a struggling writer and journalist, so poor he could only afford two pairs of pants, two shirts and some sandals. As the book begins, García Márquez joins his mother for a trip back to the village of Aracataca, where he was born, to support her in selling her parents' old house, which they discover is so dilapidated as to call into question the validity of their memories of the place.

From this journey unfolds this fabulous memoir, which tells the story of García Márquez's early life, and, by extension, that of his family. Born in 1927 to Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio, García Márquez grew up in a large household full of relatives whose mythic pasts became fodder for his later novels. His parents' romance, lovingly told here, reads like something out of the writer's great novels. Forbidden to marry, they carried on a clandestine affair until their own parents realized the seriousness of their passion.

"Living to Tell the Tale" by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman Knopf, $26.95

As one reads about García Márquez's childhood, it grows clear that this writer's family, and his memory of it, is what made him a writer. He recalls fabulous stories of bulls getting loose and terrorizing his family courtyard — "the revelry of the drama had already begun in the house and would last more than a week, with endless pots of coffee and sponge cakes to accompany the tale" — as well as more painful recollections of his cash-strapped family's desire to move.

After concluding the visit home, García Márquez returned to the big city in excitement and told a friend: "I'm writing the novel of my life." This epiphany occurred in 1950. But it would be many years before he would finish that book, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," or live comfortably off his income as a writer.

Many writers as they age enter the twilight of their powers, but García Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, appears not to be one of them. Throughout "Living to Tell the Tale," his prose is as sumptuous and lyrical as ever. It helps that nostalgia — and nostalgia's pitfalls — is the topic. Here he is describing the train trip home to Aracataca, across banana-plantation country, where the past rises up to meet him:

"I remembered the gangs of black laborers singing at twilight, the shanties on the estates where field hands sat to rest and watch freight trains go by, the ditches where morning found the cutters whose heads had been hacked off in drunken Saturday-night brawls. I remembered the private cities of the gringos in Aracataca and Sevilla, on the other side of the railroad tracks, surrounded, like enormous electrified chicken yards, by metal fences that on cool summer dawns were black with charred swallows."

Certain figures loom larger than others here — especially the author's grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, a stern yet loving man. But the presence that looms largest is the young García Márquez himself, as he drops out of college to pursue his writing and waits impatiently for his talent to catch up with his vision.

The first volume in a projected trilogy, "Living to Tell the Tale" reveals what a gamble that was to take. As with J.M. Coetzee's recent "Youth," this book brings brutally home how lonely and taxing a career is writing. Looking back on it, García Márquez is surprised he survived it — the loneliness, the whoring and drinking and smoking (60 cigarettes a day).

Stuffed with sentences as beautiful as any he's ever written, and an inspiration to readers who either want to write or merely want to transcend their own provincial roots, "Living to Tell the Tale" also reveals how handsomely that long-ago wager paid off for García Márquez: He is a maestro.

John Freeman is a writer in New York.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company