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Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: A Life
Gerald Martin
Knopf
May 2009
On Sale: May 5, 2009
672 pages
ISBN: 0307271773
EAN: 9780307271778
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The first full and authorized biography of the 1982 winner
of the Nobel Prize in Literature—the most popular
international novelist of the last fifty years. Over the course of the nearly two decades Gerald Martin
gave to the research and writing of this masterly
biography, he not only spent many hours in conversation
with Gabriel García Márquez himself but also interviewed
more than three hundred others, including García Márquez’s
wife and sons, mother and siblings, literary agent and
translators; Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alvaro
Mutis, among other writers; Fidel Castro and Felipe
González, among other political figures; his closest
friends as well as those who consider themselves his
detractors. The result is a revelation of both the writer
and the man. García Márquez’s story is a remarkable one. Born in 1927,
raised by grandparents and a clutch of aunts in a small
backwater town in Colombia, the shy, intelligent boy
matured into a reserved young man, first working as a
provincial journalist and later as a foreign correspondent,
whose years of obscurity came to an end when, at the age of
forty, he published the novel entitled Cien años de soledad—
One Hundred Years of Solitude. Within months, the book had
garnered spectacular international acclaim, the author
hailed as the standard-bearer of a new literature: magical
realism. Eight years later, in 1975, he published The
Autumn of the Patriarch, and, in 1981, Chronicle of a Death
Foretold, each novel rapturously received by critics and
readers alike. With his books read by millions around the
world, he had become a man of wealth and influence. Yet,
for all his fame, he never lost touch with his roots:
though he had lived outside of Colombia since 1955—in
Barcelona, Mexico City, Paris—his Nobel Prize was
celebrated by Colombians from all walks of life who
thought, and still think, of “Gabo” as their own. More
books followed, both fiction (Love in the Time of Cholera,
The General in his Labyrinth, Memories of My Melancholy
Whores) and nonfiction (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor,
News of a Kidnapping, Living to Tell the Tale). But García
Márquez’s renown and passion have continued to combine, as
well, in a fervent, unflagging, and often controversial
political and social activism. While chronicling the particulars of the life, Martin also
considers the overarching issues: the tension between
García Márquez’s celebrity and his quest for literary
quality, and between his politics and his writing; the
seductions of power, solitude, and love. He explores the
contrast between the exuberance of the writer’s Caribbean
background and the authoritarianism of highland Bogotá,
showing us how these differences are manifest in his
writing and in the very shape his life has taken. He
explores the melding of experience and imagination in
García Márquez’s fiction, and he examines the writer’s
reasons for—and the public’s reaction to—his turning away
in the 1980s from the magical realism that had brought him
international renown, toward the greater simplicity that
would mark his work beginning with Love in the Time of
Cholera. Gerald Martin has written a superb biography: richly
illuminating, as gripping as any of Gabriel García
Márquez’s powerful journalism, as enthralling as any of his
acclaimed and beloved fiction.
No awards found for this book.
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