"Living to Tell the Tale-- a title that conjures memories of Moby Dick, as well as this Nobel laureate's own nonfiction book, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor-- is the first volume of a planned autobiographical trilogy. But its most powerful sections read like one of his mesmerizing novels, transporting the reader to a Latin America haunted by the ghosts of history and shaped by the exigencies of its daunting geography, by its heat and jungles and febrile light. The book provides a memorable portrait of a young writer's apprenticeship as the one William Styron gave us in Sophie's Choice, even as it illuminates the alchemy Mr. García Márquez acquired from masters like Faulkner and Joyce and Borges and later used to transform family stories and firsthand experiences into fecund myths of his own."