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Gabriel Garcia Marquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2008)

by Gerald Martin(Favorite Author)

4.1 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0307272001 (ISBN13: 9780307272003)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Vintage Books USA

review 1: Soy de los que leyeron "Vivir para contarla" en busca de alguna especie de autobiografía, ese delicioso género lleno de anécdotas mentirosas. Quizá estaba mal informada, pero el mamotreto sólo me llevo por los primeros años de GGM como periodista y por historias que en sus libros de "ficción" sonaban mucho mejor (p.ej., la del romance de sus padres en "El amor en los tiempos del cólera").Pero este libro de Gerald Martin dio revancha: 700 y pico de páginas que leí de un tirón, repasando la carrera del genial escritor y su vida. Un segmento que me emocionó particularmente es el que narra su peripecia en París con Tachia, su novia española.Muy, muy recomendable.
review 2: It is so rare for a writer to achieve fame and a public life while living that ... morewe tend to imagine that those who do are something other than writers. Hemingway, for example, has his place in the collective imagination for his sporting manly 'feats', Fitzgerald for his alcoholic death, Camus for his glamour and car crash, Faulkner for his desire to run away from the limelight… The case of Gabriel García Márquez is so special and unprecedented that we almost forget just how famous he became and how much influence he was able to wield as an uncontroversial master of his field. He won the Nobel Prize when in his early 50s and on either side of that galvanising event exercised an opinion-forming power as a journalist, publisher and friend to political leaders. This lengthy, long-awaited biography - regarded by the writer himself as his 'official' biography - gives a sense of the assuredness with which this talented but impoverished young author from Colombia navigated the political and cultural streams of the mid-20th century on his way to a triumphant position as a compulsory name in the canon of international literature.It is is ways helpful that Gerald Martin is neither Latin American nor a speaker of Spanish as a first language. It is also helpful that his main angle is the literature, and not the politics, the fame, the rags-to-riches tale, the psychological makeup or the glittering savour faire in the presence of the powerful. All of that is in here, of course, but it is all a river that flows from the literary source. People since One Hundred Years of Solitude have wanted to claim this writer for themselves. Martin understands this and suggests a number of possible reasons. There is a way in which García Márquez, deprived of his family, 'exiled' from his country, deeply political and pragmatic to boot, and drawn to a discourse with the powerful as a result, brings all of these issues to bear in his worldview. He observes, empathises, ridicules and yearns for all these characters without having that earthbound certitude that blights so many sententious writers who seem to be claiming the primacy of a particular culture over others. He celebrates family, but with the absent heart grown fonder and more unflinching. He looks at power from below, above and sideways, mischievous and irreverent, but still fascinated by it, as we all seem to be at heart.He takes his time over his novels, diligently bringing them to the life he means for them. The writing is modern but classical, daring but comforting - a cocktail difficult to find in Anglophone literature, where the badge of modernity tends to repudiate certain types of storytelling - and tend to weave a hypnotic spell that far outweighs a bare description of plot details. Meanwhile he speaks out boldly in political spheres, having an influence in Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama and Mexico, not to mention the echo of his words and actions in other parts of the world. Fidel Castro is his friend, and he apparently convinces Castro to release a number of political prisoners, while the basic tenets of the Revolution.This is an extraordinary life, then, in which a young costeño from Colombia gains respect throughout the world at all levels. Martin succeeds, after a stodgy beginning, to tell this tale the way it deserves to be told, alternating between the writer's room and the corridors of power, understanding the motivations of his subject while not necessarily letting him off the hook for his elite-centric interests and occasional missteps.It is a grand biography, epic and intimate, heartfelt and reasoned. Its subject deserved no less. less

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