"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."
"So much of what García Márquez lived in these early years would feed his fiction, and Living to Tell the Tale is a delightful companion to those incomparable novels and stories. It covers just the first third of his life, but the now 76-year-old García Márquez has promised two more volumes of memoirs. For our sake, may he live to tell those tales as well."
"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."
The author starts his discussion of the book by stating, "Like a lot of American readers, I have come to equate Latin American fiction with magical realism, that style of playful and exotic world-bending most closely associated with Gabriel García Márquez." He later states about the author, “Soldan is one of a number of Latin American writers associated with the McOndo literary movement. Rejecting magical realism, which some of these writers see as an exotic and politically correct export aimed for a Euro-American market, the McOndo writers instead embrace gritty urban realism -- a style fit to explore their concerns with money, power and pleasure in a globalized, technological world. In the place of Macondo -- the fabulous village that Marquez evoked in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' -- these writers look through their windows (and computer screens) and see a world of McDonald's restaurants, iMacs and condos."
"The feud between the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, onetime best of friends, had all the elements of a literary classic: accusations of betrayal, jealousy and adultery, and a brutal encounter 31 years ago when things turned bloody. What it had lacked, however, was a wealth of documentary evidence. That all changed this month with the publication of two black-and-white portraits taken on Valentine's Day, 1976 in Mexico City that show Mr. García Márquez with a shiner - in turns smiling and serious - two days after being slugged by Mr. Vargas Llosa."
"The mayor of Gabriel García Márquez's hometown, Aracataca, failed in his quest to have it renamed Aracataca-Macondo, to honor the Nobel laureate who dubbed his fictional town Macondo in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude."
"The Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, pioneer of the school of magical realism and probably the best-known contemporary author in the Spanish-speaking world, has confessed to suffering from that most humble of literary problems: writers' block."
Viewed on 28 January, 2008.||"Gabriel García Márquez-philes will instantly recognize it as the mythical Macondo of García Márquez's fiction. In Living to Tell the Tale, he describes Aracataca by citing One Hundred Years of Solitude's opening-paragraph depiction of Macondo. Linearly put, Tale traces the author's life to age 28, shortly after he completed his first novel, Leaf storm (1955; translation, 1979). It also retells his saga of the Gabriel García Márquez clan, now stripped of the magic-realist filigrees of Solitude (1970). García Márquez name-checks all his novels and catalogs the real-life events and persons that inspired their fictional counterparts. More importantly, the book lets us peek behind the curtain to see the wizard at work. It's a master class in the art of writing, as well as the art of living a writer's life, which isn't always the same thing."
"Like the publication of Vivir para contarla, the novel's release came with a few surprises. Previously, Knopf lost thousands of sales for the author's autobiography because illegally imported foreign editions were readily available to his fans in the U.S. To avoid that mistake, the house joined forces with [Gabriel García] Márquez's agent, Carmen Balcells, and the book's other Spanish-language publishers for what was originally a worldwide release on October 27."
Viewed on 29 January, 2008. "Gabriel García Márquez festeja este 2007 el cuadragésimo aniversario de la publicación de su obra cumbre, Cien años de soledad (1967), y el cuarto de siglo desde la recepeción del Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1982."