Living to tell the Tale

A good storyteller usually has an undetectable knack for blurring the line between reality and fiction. It is a bit unusual for an author to do this with his own biography but it certainly worked for Gabriel García Márquez in his yarn-spinning autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale. I’ve read several of Márquez’ novels and some of his short stories as well and I am continually amazed at the fact that I am reading a translation – all his works that I have read have a fluid, poetic flow to them and his autobiography is not an exception.

The book opens with Gabriel in an early stage of his adult life, travelling with his mother to sell the house the family has owned his entire life. Márquez  uses this portion of his life as a kind of central reference point, with the remainder of the biography going forward or back in time from there, but continually returning to that critical era of his life: the time when he actually decided on his occupation as a writer. His family had had other plans for him: the life of a lawyer, so when he broke the news to him of his decision, he was from then on considered “a lost cause”. But he was driven by the Muse, his “crisis of inspiration, abominable but so real, that demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its own ashes in time”.

His travels throughout Colombia and descriptions of the cities there, his acquaintances and his experiences and antics consistently take on other-worldly proportions, stretching plausibility past its limit, with a subtle acknowledging wink from the author. I enjoyed reading in detail about his fascination with Simón Bolívar and how that came to be, since his novel about the generalissimo, The General in his Labyrinth is one of my favorites by him; Likewise, his memory, “mired in reality” of his first encounter with his beloved Cartagena and his immediate enrapture with that walled city.  And until reading this book, I had no idea Márquez has had a close relationship with Fidel Castro for more than half a century.

I also was surprised to find Márquez devote less than a quarter of this work to the past fifty years, basically the time he wrote his most recognizable pieces and gained notoriety, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. So if I have a knock on this book, it would be that I could do with less depictions of a twenty-two year-old’s drunken carousing a little more about the second-half of the writer’s life. I found the drive of this great writer in the following two observations by him: “The terror of writing can be as intolerable as the terror of not writing” and, “If you can live without writing, don’t write”. Luckily for us, Gabriel García Márquez decided to face the demon of writing, then took the time to paint a verbal picture about how it all came about.