Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Living To Tell The Tale

Reviewed by GORDON MCLAUCHLAN

READ the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and you come upon the sort of fantastical characters and events that get the same grip on your mind and heart that fairytales did when you were a child.

Read this first volume of his autobiography and you discover that in Colombia where he was born and raised many of the real people he describes would need only minimal embellishment to achieve the extravagantly colourful and sometimes awful behaviour of those living in his fiction. And the violence surrounding his early life was terribly real. Hardship and fear obviously feed the imagination.

Last year I met a Colombian poet and expected a morose and neurotic product of one of the world's most troubled countries. The man I got to know was droll, engaging, a mimic and hypnotic raconteur who gave a comic, ironic twist to everything. Except his poetry, which is lyrical and sad. When a Brazilian writer boasted that his countrymen were the best in the world at their national sport of soccer, the Colombian said gravely that his countrymen were easily the world's best at their national sport of kidnapping.

Marquez blazed to international literary fame just over 30 years ago with his lush and gruesome novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. He has held a place in the forefront of storytellers ever since with such modern classics as Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera, marvellous feats of imaginative writing. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

As a teenager, he was sent to university to study law but abandoned classes and tried to subsist on scraps of journalism in the city of Barranquilla. He says he didn't expect to live long and didn't seek fame or fortune, but wanted to be nothing else but a writer. Before he was out of his teens he was chain-smoking, had survived two bouts of venereal disease and was living in depressing poverty. His mother came to rescue him, ostensibly to take him back to the town of his birth to sell the abandoned family home. He knew it was time to go when in a darkened movie theatre he heard a girl he knew, who didn't know he was nearby, say to a companion, "Poor Gabito is a lost cause."

The family continued to live precarious lives with just enough money to get by. Although the period in which he grew up was relatively calm by Colombian standards, acts of violence and political oppression were nevertheless everyday occurrences. He describes in graphic and chilling detail the day on which a political leader was assassinated. Standing by ready to help with a revolution was a young Cuban university leader in Colombia for a convention, Fidel Castro.

By his early twenties Marquez had become a respected newspaper and magazine journalist and his short stories were beginning to gain critical respect. In the late 1950s he fled to Europe and has since lived in many countries but mainly Mexico in recent years. He has kept intimately in touch with events on Colombia and four years ago bought a news magazine there and began covering negotiations between the government and the various guerrilla factions that control almost half of the country.

Then he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and retired from public life to his home in Mexico City to write this book, the first of what he envisages as three volumes of autobiography.

Living to Tell the Tale, rendered into English by the woman who has been his long-time translator from the Spanish, will grip any reader with its evocation of dissolute and reckless living in a society which, however, has its own codes of honour. The narrative is written in the direct, earnest tone of News of a Kidnapping, his 1997 book of reportage about a terrifying kidnapping in Columbia. But there are also flights of marvellous descriptive writing about people and happenings that match the best of his fiction. The book graphically explains the hopeless disintegration of Colombia over the years into the dangerous, anarchic country it remains today.

But absorbing though it is, none of it can match the scary exhilaration of his greatest stories.

Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Price: $59.95