Originally published: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, c2003. |"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... 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 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. This is a memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel García Márquez as a writer and as a man." --Dust Jacket