He found literary-minded friends all along the way too (Álvaro Mutis, in particular, came to be a close friend), and he also found a great deal of encouragement. My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house. She had come that morning from the distant town where the family lived, and she had no idea how to find me. She asked around among acquaintances and was told to look for me at the Librería Mundo, or in the nearby cafés, where I went twice a day to talk with my writer friends. The one who told her this warned her: "Be careful, because they're all out of their minds." She arrived at twelve sharp. With her light step she made her way among the tables of books on display, stopped in front of me, looking into my eyes with the mischievous smile of her better days, and before I could react she said:

In Living to Tell the Tale Gabriel Garcia Marquez - winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude - recounts his personal experience of returning to the house in which he grew up and the memories that this visit conjured. 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.Recalling the tenacity with which she had broken down her family's opposition to her marriage, I said with a laugh:

Q: What do you learn about Spanish-language/Latin American literature when you translate García Márquez? The memoir begins, “My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house” [p. 3], and then weaves a story of how and why that day was unforgettable: “This simple two-day trip would be so decisive that the longest and most diligent of lives would not be enough for me to finish recounting it. Now, with more than seventy-five years behind me, I know it was the most important of all the decisions I had to make in my career as a writer. That is to say: in my entire life” [p. 5]. The sentence is reminiscent of many moments in One Hundred Years of Solitude, when an event is identified as setting in motion the story and the meanings that flow from it. If García Márquez is deliberately tying a moment in his own life to certain moments in his fiction, where a decisive, unforgettable experience is illuminated and obsessively returned to, what is he suggesting about the nature of his own story?

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By turns wistful and uncompromising, wise and funny, it has a surety of touch that never lets you forget you are in the hands of a master storyteller. (...) It provides an unusually complete account of the evolution of an artistic sensibility (.....) As a reflection on an extraordinary life, and an insight into a man of exemplary humanity, this memoir is magnificent." - Catherine Keenan, Sydney Morning Herald

Gabriel García Márquez a fost crescut o vreme de bunicii de pe mamă, la Aracataca. Bunicul lui fusese colonel, participase la Războiul Celor O Mie de Zile, dar acum e poreclit de toți Papaleto și e un ins pașnic și cumpănit. Poate (și Living to Tell the Tale is an exercise in remembering, but without the tensions and contrivances of the novel." - Alastair Reid, The New York Review of Books English–Arabic English–Bengali English–Catalan English–Czech English–Danish English–Hindi English–Korean English–Malay English–Marathi English–Russian English–Tamil English–Telugu English–Thai English–Turkish English–Ukrainian English–Vietnamese What is the tone in which García Márquez recounts his life? How intimate is his relationship with the reader? What is his own attitude toward his younger self? No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabriel García Márquez. In this long-awaited autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life from his birth in1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.Un memoir, cum spun englezii, folosind un cuvînt din franceza veche. Este, firește, povestea unui triumf, redactată cu umor și modestie. Există și versiuni negative ale unei astfel de scrieri, autorul prezintă un itinerariu care sfîrșește în eșec, precum Rousseau în Confesiuni. As this first volume of his memoirs again shows, García Márquez is a true storyteller, relating epsiodes with charm and a disarming facility. Living to Tell the Tale is a succulent memoir and delivers a powerful lesson in storytelling -- and is also a delightful read." - Angel Gurria-Quintana, The Observer Garcia Marquez escaped the capital (wading through a morass of blood and mud, as he puts it) and returned to the coastal area, again muddling through as best he could, nominally still a law student but ever as eager only to write. But official hostility was rising. Within a few months Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, confronted with four more British ships rescuing hundreds of boat people. She was strongly against taking them in, ostensibly on the grounds of being “fearful of UK public opinion”, even though the UK had accepted only a tiny fraction compared to the 250,000 Vietnamese refugees admitted by the US and 60,000 by France. A Home Office memo warned that accepting more “would be seen as leading to an influx of immigrants which we could not control”. Thatcher eventually relented over the ships already carrying boat people, but demanded “a cast-iron position in legal and political terms which would enable the UK to hold out against admitting refugees”. She also wanted Britain to withdraw from the 1951 refugee convention.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927. He studied at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947), Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1958), In Evil Hour (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). Many of his books are published by Penguin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in 2014. As we follow the struggles of the emerging writer, it also becomes clearer just what García Márquez means by that seemingly strange term, "solitude", that is present in all of his books. Despite the teeming life of the fiction, it is plain that Colombia, and to an even greater extent his tiny home town of Aracataca, is almost completely cut off from events taking place in the world outside. Returning with his mother to sell the family home confirms in García Márquez his determination to be a writer. But he had been expelled from the Caribbean eden many years before, when his family sent him to the Colombian capital, Bogota, to study. Although Aracataca and Bogota are part of the same country, they could not be more different. Where the Caribbean province offered warmth, family, friends and a world full of magic, the capital, high up in the Andes, was "a remote, lugubrious city where an insomniac rain had been falling since the beginning of the 16th century". Diep Quan studied for a degree in business and accounts. “I’m one of Thatcher’s children. Business. Got to go make money. Still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew that was the stepping stone to get to where the money is.” Today, she works as an IT trainer on contract to Morgan Stanley. García Márquez circles around in this memoir, focussing on the years when he actually became a writer (in his early twenties) but returning to his own childhood and youth and how the experiences from those times made him the writer he was becoming.

García Márquez writes of his maternal grandparents’ house, where he spent the first eight years of his life, “I cannot imagine a family environment more favorable to my vocation than that lunatic house” [p. 90]. Which aspects of this household, and which people in it, have the strongest impact on the creative life of the child? Yet its sum is not a Bildungsroman of the author, whose personality is rarely front-lit, but the re-creation of an astonishing universe, the Caribbean coastlands of Colombia in the first half of the last century. Anyone who might think that a factual counterpart of García Márquez's fictions could be at best only a pallid duplicate can be reassured. Scene after remarkable scene, character after arresting character, cascades of gestures without measure and coincidences beyond reason make Living to Tell the Tale a cousin of the great novels." - Perry Anderson, The Nation I didn't marry until I had my parents' blessing," she said. "Unwilling, I grant you, but I had it."