"The life of Gabriel García Márquez, the magical realist whose much-loved fifth novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, helped him secure the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, has already been assembled in fragments. Lacking from a book such as The Fragrance of Guava, an extended interview published in the year of the Nobel, is the whimsical grace of the fiction. Márquez's own account of his early years, Living to Tell the Tale, is first and foremost a storyteller's story, a languid spell cast by a master of language."