"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."