"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."