Living to Tell the Tale

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I didn't marry until I had my parents' blessing," she said. "Unwilling, I grant you, but I had it." His political awareness is stirred only by the "same civil war we had been fighting since our independence from Spain", the fight between liberals and conservatives that has cost so many thousands of Colombian lives. The event that marks him most strongly is the killing of the popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and the ensuing violence leads him to declare that "on April 9 1948, the 20th century began in Colombia".

Trying to convince my parents of this kind of lunacy, when they had placed so much hope in me and spent so much money they did not have, was a waste of time. My father in particular would have forgiven me anything except my not hanging on the wall the academic degree he could not have. Our communication was interrupted. Almost a year later I was still planning a visit to explain my reasons to him when my mother appeared and asked me to go with her to sell the house. But she did not mention the subject until after midnight, on the launch, when she sensed as if by divine revelation that she had at last found the opportune moment to tell me what was, beyond any doubt, the real reason for her trip, and she began in the manner and tone and with the precise words that she must have ripened in the solitude of her sleepless nights long before she set out.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. García Márquez says of his father, “Papá was a difficult man to see into or to please. He was always very much poorer than he seemed and considered poverty a hateful enemy he could never accept and never defeat” [p. 56]. How does the memoir portray García Márquez’s relationship with his father, and what situations were crucial in determining his feelings about his father?

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of Gabriel García Márquez’s proposed three-part memoir. We hope they will provide useful ways of thinking and talking about the life story of one of the greatest Latin American writers of our time. Introduction Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927. He studied at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947), Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1958), In Evil Hour (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). Many of his books are published by Penguin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in 2014. Critic Michael Wood has noted that the book suggests “again and again, that the world this writer grew up in was effectively a García Márquez novel before he even touched it” [ London Review of Books, 3 June 2004, p. 3]. García Márquez himself comments on this phenomenon when he writes, “It was not one of those [stories] that are invented on paper. Life invents them” [p. 528]. Is it true that the sense of fecundity, the density of inspiration, and the frequent occurrence of improbable happenings provided García Márquez with exactly what he needed for his art? Discuss a few events in his novels that you now know have their origins in the author’s life. For readers familiar with his works, the autobiography provides delicious illuminations of his fiction. (...) The book is a treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we always knew existed but couldn’t find. (...) The book is a treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we always knew existed but couldn’t find." - Neel Mukherjee, The TimesGabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, The General in His Labyrinth, and News of a Kidnapping. He lives in Mexico City. Suggested Reading

Regarding the countless interviews he has given throughout his career, García Márquez says, “An immense majority of the ones I have not been able to avoid on any subject ought to be considered as an important part of my works of fiction, because they are no more than that: fantasies about my life” [p. 489]. In a memoir, as opposed to an interview, an author controls the way he is viewed by the public. What truth about himself and his life does García Márquez seem to want to convey? About this Author Santana-Acuña's Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic This was the 1970s, when the National Front and casual racism loomed large in Britain. “We had all the usual taunts walking to school – racist names,” said Quan. “I’d hear stories from my mum all the time. The adults themselves felt it more keenly. They found it really hard.” Vivir para contarla es, probablemente, el libro más esperado de la década, compendio y recreación de un tiempo crucial en la vida de Gabriel García Márquez. En este apasionante relato, el premio Nobel colombiano ofrece la memoria de sus años de infancia y juventud, aquellos en los que se fundaría el imaginario que, con el tiempo, daría lugar a algunos de los relatos y novelas fundamentales en la literatura en lengua española del siglo XX.Living to Tell the Tale is a succulent memoir and delivers a powerful lesson in storytelling -- and is also a delightful read." - Angel Gurria-Quintana, The Observer Where it had muddled along all his life, it was with this one fell swoop thrust into the 20th century. For us, the crew were heroes’: Diep Quan, middle row far right, with her sister. They are pictured on the Wellpark after being rescued. Photograph: Mike Newton Recalling the tenacity with which she had broken down her family's opposition to her marriage, I said with a laugh: As this first volume of his memoirs again shows, García Márquez is a true storyteller, relating epsiodes with charm and a disarming facility.