"Would that I could read the original Spanish version!...The first volume of Márquez's proposed memoir trilogy...is an eloquent, lyrical odyssey into the birth of a writer's life, and watching the brilliant novelist Márquez performing many different phases of youthful self-discovery is a fascinating thing." Adrienne Miller, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Synopses & Reviews
In this long-awaited first volume of a planned trilogy, the most acclaimed and revered living Nobel laureate begins to tell us the story of his life.
Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the shape, the quality, and the vividness of a conversation with the reader—a tale of people, places, and events as they occur to him: the colorful stories of his eccentric family members; the great influence of his mother and maternal grandfather; his consuming career in journalism, and the friends and mentors who encouraged him; the myths and mysteries of his beloved Colombia; personal details, undisclosed until now, that would appear later, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction; and, above all, his fervent desire to become a writer. And, as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at the heart of a life—in this instance, his own.
Living to Tell the Tale is a radiant, powerful, and beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel García Márquez as a writer and as a man.
Review:
"Invaluable in its personal and cultural history, and triumphant in its compassion and artistry, García Márquez's portrait of himself as a young writer is as revelatory and powerful as his fiction." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:
"[I]ts most powerful sections read like one of his mesmerizing novels...[A] memorable a portrait of a young writer's apprenticeship." Michiku Kakutani, The New York Times
Review:
"[B]old, high-spirited, self-mocking, powerfully evocative and deeply revealing....[I]ncredibly deep and rich." Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
Review:
"Powerful, brilliant, and essential." Library Journal
Synopsis:
No writer alive today exerts the magical appeal of Gabriel García Márquez. Now, in the long-awaited first volume of his autobiography, he tells the story of his life from his birth in 1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.
Here is García Márquez's shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves, Living to Tell the Tale is a work of enchantment.
Synopsis:
From the Nobel Laureate writer Marquez comes a magnificent piece of writing that finds him telling the story of his life from his birth in 1927 through his career as a writer.
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