Rating: 
Summary: An Extraordinary Memoir - Myth & History, Magic & Fact!
Review: "Living to Tell the Tale," ("Vivir Para Contarla"), is the first book in a planned trilogy that will make up the memoirs of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the renown Colombian writer who initially won public acclaim in the mid-1960s for his novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude." At that time, Garcia Marquez, a journalist and writer, had never sold more than 700 copies of a book. While driving his family through Mexico, he had a veritable brainstorm. He remembered his grandmother's storytelling technique - to recall fantastic, improbable events as if they had actually happened - literally. That was the key to recounting the life of the imaginary village of Macondo and her inhabitants. He turned the car around and drove back home to begin "One Hundred Years of Solitude" anew. To my mind it is one of the 20th century's best works of fiction, and was highlighted in the citation awarding Garcia Marquez the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
"Living to Tell The Tale" relates the early years of the author's life, although some of the book's most important incidents predate Garcia Marquez's birth. The impact of these experiences, the people and their stories, were to have a powerful effect on him, as a man and as a writer. This is the tale of his parents' courtship, marriage and the birth of their children, Garcia Marquez, (Gabito), the oldest, and his ten siblings. It tells of his early years which were spent in Aracataca, in the home of his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, was a Liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days. He was supposedly a storyteller of great repute. The Colonel told his young grandson that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man. Later García Márquez would put these words into the mouths of his characters. His grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, had a major influence on Gabriel's life also. Another great source of stories, her mind was filled with superstitions and folklore, and she gossiped away with her numerous sisters within hearing range of young "Gabito." No matter how fantastic her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the absolute, verifiable truth. This was the style which was to effect Garcia Marquez's fiction, sometimes called "magical realism." These women filled the house with stories of ghosts, premonitions and omens - all of which were studiously ignored by her husband. He had little interest in "women's beliefs."
Aracataca was a small village, a banana town on the Caribbean coast, where poverty was the norm and violence was an everyday occurrence. On December 6, 1928, in the Cienaga train station, near Aracataca, 3,000 striking banana workers were shot and killed by troops from Antioquia. Although still a baby, this event, recounted to him, was to have a profound effect on the author. The incident was officially forgotten and omitted from Colombian history textbooks.
In 1940, when he was twelve, Gabo was awarded a scholarship to a secondary school for gifted students, run by Jesuits. The school, the Liceo Nacional, was in Zipaquirá, a city 30 miles to the north of Bogotá. It was during his school years, 1940s and 50s, that he was first drawn to poetry - a national obsession in Colombia. Verse was revered as an art form, and also as an effective means of social and political commentary. He and his friends, fellow students, would read aloud and discuss poetry late into the night. The youths admired a group of poets called the piedra y cielo ("stone and sky") and they were strongly influenced by Juan Ramon Jimenez and Pablo Neruda. Too poor to buy his own books, Gabo would devour novels borrowed from friends.
While still a boy, he decided he wanted to be a writer. The people who surrounded him in his childhood later became instrumental when developing the characters and the storylines for his novels. "Love In The Time of Cholera" was inspired by the romance between his mother and father. And his grandfather, who had twelve children, (some say 16), by two different women, became Colonel Aureliano Buendia in "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
One of the most powerful episodes of the book tells of the period called "La Violencia." In 1948 the Liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, was assassinated. The murder led to rioting, and left approximately 2500 dead on the streets of Bogota, during "el Bogotázo." Political violence and repression followed. One of the buildings that burned was the pension where Garcia Marquez lived, and his manuscripts were destroyed along with his living quarters. The National University was closed and he was forced to go to the university in Cartagena. Garcia Marquez began his career as a journalist, writing stories and commentary for a Liberal newspaper in Cartegana. Later he moved to the coastal city of Barranquilla where he began to associate with a group of young writers who admired modernists like Joyce, Woolf and Hemingway, and introduced Marquez to Faulkner. In 1954 he returned to Bogota, as a reporter for El Espectador.
Garcia Marquez begins his book, however, not with his real birth in 1928, but with his "birth as a writer," at age 22. He and his mother took a trip from Baranquilla, where he was working as a reporter, to his childhood home in Aracataca, now virtually a ghost town. They were going to sell the ancestral house. Vivid memories were stirred up here, memories which electrified his imagination. This trip was to change the course of his writing life. "With the first step I took onto the burning sands of the town, Aracataca instantly became Macondo, an earthly paradise of desolation and nostalgia." His one great subject became his family, "which was never the protagonist of anything, but only a witness to and victim of everything." His is not a chronological autobiography. Garcia Marquez cuts back and forth through time to show how memory colors experience. As he says in the book's epigraph, "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it."
Humor, dry wit, a sense of the absurd, is a trademark throughout the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this autobiography is full of his deadpan humor. His anecdotes of his many mistresses and cafe society are wonderful. "Living To Tell The Tale" is not a conventional literary memoir. It is a magical combination of memoir and national history written in the author's remarkable voice. It is his personal mythology, from the repertoire which birthed Macondo. The narrative is intimate and sincere, filled with bewitching details and descriptions. In spite of poverty, and the political turmoil so prevalent in Colombia during his lifetime, Gabo acknowledges his early years were filled with joy, a sense of well-being and encouragement from many people. Garcia Marquez leaves us, at the end of this volume, with a glimpse of his future love, his wife, ""wearing a green dress with golden lace in that year's style, her hair cut like swallows' wings, and with the intense stillness of someone waiting for a person who will not arrive."
Edith Grossman has done a fine translation. Kudos to her. Bravo Gabriel Garcia Marquez!!
JANA
Rating:
Summary: Equal to His Best Novels
Review: "Living to tell the Tale" is an autobiography of the first 25-30 years of the life of the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was impressed just several pages into the book with the realization that this is not like any other autobiography (or regular biography) that I have read. This is a gifted author trying in words to make sense out of his life. That's not to imply that the author is finding out who he is right along with the rest of us. Rather, it is the author reliving those years with the ability to diagram the important events of his life no matter how meaningless they may have seemed at the time. One of the aspects that makes this book so impressive is that the author has led, from the beginning, a very interesting life. He was born into a poverty that had just enough of an income to give him the educational opportunities to discover his talents. Easily distracted by the here and now, Garcia Marquez had many chances to go irretrievibly astry. Yet these chances also introduced him to many people and places that would be the subjects of his writings. Clearly though, the most influencial people were his family; especially his mother and grandfather. Along the way we see the seeds (and, in some cases, fruition) of virtually every one of his books with the exception of "Clandestine in Chile" and "News of a Kidnapping". We watch the young man grow and mature into a socially and politically conscious reporter. Every step of the way is brought to us so intimately by the author that we feel as if we are sitting silently at the same table as he. All of this is more impressive when considering that the author's previous works of non-fiction are, in my opinion, of a lesser quality than his fiction. In the others, he was writing as a reporter. In "Living to Tell the Tale" he comes across as a tour guide of his life. The book actually loses some of its' impact once he does become a reporter (about 2/3's of the way into the book). We switch from the interpersonal to the events of the day. However, the positive side is that Garcia Marquez was often an eye-witness to the major events in the Columbia of his youth.
All in all this is a tremendous work by a very gifted author. My favorite book of his is "Love in the Time of Cholera". This one is a close second.
Rating:
Summary: Like stepping into a beautiful dream . . .
Review: Reading Marquez' work is like stepping into the most excellent dream where every one of your senses is put on red alert. The first volume in a planned autobiographical triology is no different from his fiction. You cannot read it quickly. You cannot scan the pages. You'll miss something important/beautiful/exquisite tucked into a sentence or a paragraph if you do. Marquez' gifts are legion. Do yourself a favor. Get this book and then block out some time each day to travel through time with one of the world's greatest wordsmiths.
Rating:
Summary: A Rich, Full Life: A Book Review: Living to Tell the Tale, b
Review: A Rich, Full Life: A Book Review: Living to Tell the Tale, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book reads like a literary work, its imagery allowing us into the inner sanctum of the writer. Reading Living to Tell the Tale is an easy yet rich, simple yet complex experience. Mr. Marquez tells his tale, as someone who has grown up in poverty, going on to live a rich, full life, never forgetting his roots. He is at the center of his tale, alone, yet part of his world. I was repeatedly astounded how something so simple could offer such depth and complexity. The story is a life journey, in which we are jolted forward and back then forward again by the author. Marquez recounts his life beautifully only as a master story teller can recount it. This may be read as a guide for writers, to trace the source of the author's skills; Marquez claims his heritage from the lineage of his European ancestor in the form of Greek Classical literature; from his Colombian and South American contemporaries, and from his upbringing and environment, which he draws upon for material. Inspiration, magic and the unusual cast of characters he met in life also guided him. The author is an explicit, robust vibrant man, full of earthly desire for drink, women and cigarettes. He loved access to obscure facts, which allowed him to wheedle out of mundane examinations. Marquez writes about Columbia, local cultural events, local people and the select group of artistic creatives among whom he traveled. As in his novels and stories he describes the social fabric, the political backdrop, human passions, crimes, and loves. He describes people, a relative with a "mordant smile", a character adherent to "inviolable laws". He describes a journalistic trip to document local military activities: "A colonel with battle decorations, the good looks of a film star and an intelligent affability explained without alarm that the advance guard of the guerilla had been in the house". He loved reading. Living his life fully while learning his art and scrapping by, her reads everything he can get his hands on. He meets and converses with a vast array of people from amazing, deep thinkers to friends, to local roust-abouts. Some are recognizable to the average reader (Fidel Castro) while some may be known only to a select group of readers, the café culture of the 1950's Colombia. The author weaves a descriptive memory-laden fabric of his path to becoming a writer " I learned to appreciate my sense of smell, whose power of nostalgic evocation is overwhelming." He recounts the journey with rewind, and fast-forward dreams, as well as with coherent, simple self-analysis while describing who he was and is, lightly gently, kissingly. "Today I realize, however, that the simple sentence was my very first literary success". He is a writer's writer while remaining a writer of the people. Telling the tale of his families' past as well as that of his own, we discover the making of a Nobel Prize winning writer is deeply rooted in rich soil. He tells us enough of himself, but never too much.
Rating: 
Summary: A magical start, but then reality sets in...
Review: About a third of the way through this book I was thinking, "Wow! This is the best autobiography I've ever read." His recollection of visiting Aracataca with his mother to sell his grandparents' house was wonderfully evocative. It reminded me of what I love about his fiction. But the book was tough to finish. The weight of so many characters with confusing names almost dragged me under. At least for non-Spanish readers, this book needs a "dramatis personae". I wish I had compiled one for myself, and I recommend anyone starting this book to do so. The editors must have been afraid to do their job. A couple of times, the same story or phrase was repeated. The latter half of the book is disjointed and rambling. I was dismayed to find that this is only the first of three volumes. I think I'll pass on the rest of them.
Rating:
Summary: A return to the Marquez labrynith of love and death
Review: Did you ever want to read a sequal to 100 Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera? There can be no sequal, but there can be a journey back through the labrynith of Marquez's life stories from a new magical direction. His best material was always based on his family histories, so now under the guise of 'autobiography' he is respinning his tales anew. It is not just his direct references, or how the style echos the best of his novels, here and there he is even using the same descriptive elements (the rocks in the river look like prehistoric eggs) to let you know that you have quietly slipped back into that narrative swamp he weaves so well. I only hopes he lives to tell the rest of the tale, and that it comes out as well as this one.
Rating:
Summary: Quitessential Marqu¨¦z
Review: For those familiar with GGM, there is no surprise in this book, only his effortless story-telling, beguiling manipulation of time, and trademark one-line dialogue. For the 'scholars' interested in the autobiographical backgrounds of GGM's masterpieces, there are some major revelations about the prototypes of his unforgettable characters, such as Famina Daza, Colonel Buendia, and Ursula. However, I am somewhat suspicious that Marqu¨¦z is telling as it was ... There are just too many of his old tricks for me to believe the events recounted in the book are historically accurate. If they are, the Margu¨¦z clan sure had the most headcases per capita in Columbia. Mind you, the above observation is not a criticism at all! It is the way an autobiography should be written, namely, let the readers know the motivation and inspiration of the author's actions, not historical facts, which for the most part would not be that interesting. Every GGM fan should read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Not a traditional biography...
Review: Gabriel García Marquez says that "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." And that is, in few words, "Living to tell the tale": the author's version of his own life, as he remembers it now.
This book is merely the first volume in the author's three-part autobiography, but it is an essential way to start if we want to know more about him, as a writer but also as a person. As we read this book, we become enchanted by the author's eccentric extended family (he is the oldest of 15, between brothers and sisters, in and out of wedlock), and by all the events that would give him inspiration for future books. One of those events is his trip to his native town of Aratacata, in order to help his mother to sell her parents' house in that town. It is in that trip that he decides "I'm going to be a writer...Nothing but a writer".
Of course, this isn't a traditional biography, but that is something the reader is likely to know in advance, if he takes into account that the author of "Living to tell the tale" is García Marquez. You can expect a wonderful prose, interesting and somewhat strange metaphors, and the kind of description that manages to capture a moment in such a way that the reader feels that he was there too. That happened to me many times while I was reading this book, for instance when he describes his visit to Aratacata, his inspiration for Macondo: "The first thing that struck me was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the other silences in the world. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through undulating glass. As far as the eye could see there was no recollection of human life, nothing that was not covered by a faint sprinkling of burning dust".
What is more, García Marquez shares details of his school years, his multitude of friends, and the innumerable nights all of them passed discussing many things, but mainly literature, and Colombia. The aspiring writer, or the curious reader, will know more about his favourite books, ideas, and reasons for writing ("Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die"). García Marquez also gives us some small details that make him more real, for example that he always has had lots of problems with orthography :)
Notwithstanding that, I suppose that a warning is in order: if you cannot stand a book that isn't linear, you aren't likely to like this book. "Living to tell the tale" is beautifully written, and gives us an enormous amount of information about García Marquez's life. However, the author jumps between years and events quite frequently, something that some people might dislike. I wasn't bothered by that, mainly because I think that is merely another resource he uses to succeed in his aim, that is tell a good story and charm his reader.
Also, I would like to point out that even though this translation to English is quite good, it isn't the same than reading "Vivir para contarla" (= "Living to tell the tale") in the original Spanish edition. There are some things that cannot be translated, particularly in literature, without losing at least some nuances of meaning. If that is the case, you might ask yourself why do I give the English edition of this book 5 stars out of five. The answer is simple: I loved this book so much that I even liked the translation. All the same, the only true solution to appreciate just how good it is would be to read it in Spanish, so if you don't speak it yet, learn it. You won't find a better reason to do so :)
On the whole, I highly recommend this book. Yes, "Living to tell the tale" might seem at first sight rather long (544 pages), but that first impression changes quite quickly once you start to read it, because you realize that such a simple looking book contains the events and people that shaped the boy, teenager and young adult that would grow to become one of the best writers of our times. What can I say?. Not to be missed !!!!
Belen Alcat
Rating:
Summary: Expected more
Review: I am a big fan, and although it's not a bad book I expected more from him. I had the following problems with the book:
1) Editing - It could easily have been 25% shorter, in addition several stories are repeated. I've seen this often in famous authors. I guess either their books are not edited at all, or the editor is afraid to do his job.
2) The translation--There are sentences that do not make sense. I read them over several times, and they are just poorly written.
3) Maybe the book shouldn't have been translated. There's quite a bit of Colombian politics whic probably strikes a chord among South Americans, but I was lost.
4) I got the feeling several times that he was writing the book to thank people who had helped him get his start, which slowed down the pace of the book
Rating: 
Summary: Big disappointment
Review: I guess Gabriel Garcia Marquez is enough of a legend that book reviewers will fawn all over him even when he writes a mess like this. There is just very little in this book that is interesting. It seems to be random memories in no particular order of people and places that aren't particularly interesting at all described in an endless string of cliches. I'm sure these random anecdotes are fun for the author's family and friends (who actually have some idea who all these people are who get mentioned for a paragraph then dropped) to read, but for the rest of us, who cares? I gave up after struggling about half way through when I started dry heaving after I read this amazingly bad line: "I had to take the trip back and forth several times during the four years of the baccalaureate and another two at the university, and each time I learned more about life than I ever did in school."
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