"As Mr. García Márquez observes in the opening pages of Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell It), the memoir of his life to early manhood, "until adolescence, the memory is more interested in the future than the past, so my memories of the town were not yet idealized by nostalgia." The first volume of his memoirs has been eagerly awaited; now here, it is lording it over the Spanish-speaking world's bestsellers lists, including that for the Hispanic market in the United States. Mr. García Márquez's fans will not be disappointed. Once again, he mines the rich seam of his memories of Colombia's Caribbean coast from the 1920s to the 1950s which provide the material for his novels."
During the week of February 8, 2004, One Hundred Years of Solitude ranked in the number one slot in Fiction of the paperback best sellers' list in the New York Times. The magical realist novel about the Buendía family and the mythical town of Macondo was first published in 1967.
This is a review of García Márquez's memoir, Vivir para contarla. Mujica states: "The book functions as a kind of guide to works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Love in the Time of Cholera, illuminating material familiar to readers and placing it in its real-life context. Vivir para contarla covers approximately the first thirty years of the author's life, the formative period that stretches from his birth until the mid-1950s."
Christenson focuses on the book Vivir para contarla (To Live to Tell the Tale), a memoir by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. She relates the anticipation for the book in the Spanish-speaking communities of the United States and mentions the pirated imports and photocopied versions of the book.
Pearl reviews the fiction book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, presenting us with a brief summary of the plot and commenting that One Hundred Years of Solitude "records the tumultuous lives of the Buendia family and the town's other inhabitants in a compulsive narrative that follows their loves, madnesses, wars, alliances, compromises, dreams, and deaths-- sweeping us up in its exquisite and poetic rendering of the passions and the pains of life."
"So much of what García Márquez lived in these early years would feed his fiction, and Living to Tell the Tale is a delightful companion to those incomparable novels and stories. It covers just the first third of his life, but the now 76-year-old García Márquez has promised two more volumes of memoirs. For our sake, may he live to tell those tales as well."
Viewed on 28 January, 2008.||"Gabriel García Márquez-philes will instantly recognize it as the mythical Macondo of García Márquez's fiction. In Living to Tell the Tale, he describes Aracataca by citing One Hundred Years of Solitude's opening-paragraph depiction of Macondo. Linearly put, Tale traces the author's life to age 28, shortly after he completed his first novel, Leaf storm (1955; translation, 1979). It also retells his saga of the Gabriel García Márquez clan, now stripped of the magic-realist filigrees of Solitude (1970). García Márquez name-checks all his novels and catalogs the real-life events and persons that inspired their fictional counterparts. More importantly, the book lets us peek behind the curtain to see the wizard at work. It's a master class in the art of writing, as well as the art of living a writer's life, which isn't always the same thing."
"October 2002 was marked by the publication of Vivir para contarla, the intensely anticipated first volume of Gabriel García Márquez's memoirs. In this 579-page text (Argentine edition), the Colombian Nobel laureate recounts with the brilliant imagination and stylistic virtuosity that have characterized his literary production the first thirty years of his life, from his childhood in Aracataca to his first trip to Europe in 1957 as a foreign correspondent for the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. These years were highly influential in his development as a writer and in the creation of the fictional world of his early short stories and novels, the "Macondo" cycle. It is a text that can be read as a memoir or a fictional text, or an amalgam of the two forms."
Bradu reviews Del amor y otros demonios and in the process includes some similarities and differences between Del amor y otros demonios and El general en su laberinto. Bradu says that García Márquez has become the best imitator of himself; Del amor y otros demonios is a brief summary of rhetorical and identifiable figures that the reader could suspect to be a plagiarism if it weren't for its genius inventor. Del amor y otros demonios oscillates between fairy tale and a machiavellic version of the Colony.
Reviewing El general en su laberinto, Castañon offers that fans and readers of the book were so into the novel, distraught, tired from staying up to finish it, somber, and then went back to reread the novel as characters who were locked in stone and mud. For some, the novel was or is a tribute or a betrayal to Fidel Castro. For others, the novel was about Che Guevara, a symbolic imitation of the failed guerrilla that we all carry inside.
Viewed on 28 January, 2008.||Same content as article also written by Freeman in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Latin American Beauties: García Márquez memoir shows how family made him a writer."
Atlanta, Georgia : The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Related Item Details:
4D
Notes:
Freeman's review on Living to Tell the Tale: "The verdict: A maestro at work. Full of rich researched anecdotes from the writer's childhood in a small Colombian village, the book has all the weight and exquisite storytelling prowess of Márquez's two fiction masterpieces, Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude."
"One Hundred Years of Solitude is so ingrained in world culture that it has assumed the feel of an epic folktale- it's strange to think there was a time, not so long ago, when it wasn't around. Love in the Time of Cholera, Autumn of the Patriarch, and others aren't far behind. So it's cause for rejoicing that Gabriel García Márquez has chosen, while still clearly at the height of his powers, to embark on his autobiography, of which this book is the first in a projected trilogy. Readers will relish the chance to sift the Colombian author's life for the seeds of his magic realism, and the master doesn't disappoint."
Cryer begins by comparing Living to Tell the Tale by García Márquez to the most recent Nobel honoree, J.M Coetzee, then leads into solely Living to Tell the Tale.||"Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of a projected autobiographical trilogy, is a self-portrait in vivid colors and bold strokes. It is as ebullient and nonjudgmental as the memoirs of the most recent Nobel honoree, J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth, are restrained and quietly furious."
Subscription required to view full text. || One Hundred Years of Solitude is deemed the fourth spot on the Top 10 bestseller paperback list of the Birmingham news.