Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Gerald Martin: Gabriel García Márquez - A Life

Glenn C. Altschuler reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez - A Life

Sick of school and the expectations placed on him, 18-year-old Gabriel Garcia Marquez joined a musical group, partied all night, and disappeared for days at a time at a local whorehouse.

Not the kind of behavior, his mother told him, for someone with the potential to be a novelist. If he was going to be a writer, Garcia Marquez shot back, he wanted to be "one of the greats and they don't make them anymore."

A little more than two decades later, with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a history of the settlement in Colombia he named Macondo, set on the border between "true facts" and imagined details, Garcia Marquez became world-famous. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1985, he attracted millions more readers with Love in the Time of Cholera, a remarkable meditation on the human terms of endearment.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gerald Martin, a professor emeritus of modern languages at the University of Pittsburgh, provides a richly detailed, authorized biography, based on conversations with his subject, conducted over 15 years; hundreds of interviews with family members, friends, and foes; and extensive archival research.

Though Martin pulls a punch or two in assessing Garcia Marquez's fidelity to Fidel Castro, his book is a judicious - and occasionally juicy - examination of the relationship among Gabo's life, his politics, and his work.
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Gerald Martin: Gabriel García Márquez - A Life

Jonathan Yardley reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez - A Life

Far more so than most writers, Gabriel García Márquez has lived a full life that goes beyond his typewriter or, more recently, his computer. Not merely has he written three of the 20th century's greatest novels -- "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "The Autumn of the Patriarch" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" -- but he has been a highly active participant in public events during a time of immense change and controversy in Latin America. He has been the friend and confidant of presidents (and dictators), a leading advocate of leftist politics, a dabbler in movie-making and a widely read, influential journalist, among other things.

For the literary biographer, this is a heady mix. To be sure, in García Márquez's case as in every writer's, the books are all that really matters, but there's a real story here as well. Gerald Martin, a British academic who specializes in Latin American literature, has been "working on this biography for seventeen years," with the "friendly, hospitable and tolerant" acquiescence of its subject, and on the whole has made the most of the opportunities that García Márquez's life offers. He does rattle on too long about García Márquez's political activities, but he skillfully shows how a long journalistic apprenticeship led to the incredible creative explosion that produced "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
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Saturday, May 16, 2009

Gerald Martin Gabriel García Márquez - A Life

Jonathan Yardley reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez - A Life

Far more so than most writers, Gabriel García Márquez has lived a full life that goes beyond his typewriter or, more recently, his computer. Not merely has he written three of the 20th century's greatest novels -- "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "The Autumn of the Patriarch" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" -- but he has been a highly active participant in public events during a time of immense change and controversy in Latin America. He has been the friend and confidant of presidents (and dictators), a leading advocate of leftist politics, a dabbler in movie-making and a widely read, influential journalist, among other things.

For the literary biographer, this is a heady mix. To be sure, in García Márquez's case as in every writer's, the books are all that really matters, but there's a real story here as well. Gerald Martin, a British academic who specializes in Latin American literature, has been "working on this biography for seventeen years," with the "friendly, hospitable and tolerant" acquiescence of its subject, and on the whole has made the most of the opportunities that García Márquez's life offers. He does rattle on too long about García Márquez's political activities, but he skillfully shows how a long journalistic apprenticeship led to the incredible creative explosion that produced "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

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Friday, May 08, 2009

Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco won the XVIII Premio Reina Sofía de Poesia. Read More


Kindle Dx

Read the analysis from Peter Glaskowsky, David Rothman and Karen Templer.

Bloomsbury has acquired world English rights to  The Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas. Read More


Una llave en East Lansing

Soy una pieza de limado acero.
Mi borde irregular no es arbitrario.
Duermo mi vago sueño en un armario
Que no veo, sujeta a mi llavero.
Hay una cerradura que me espera.
Una sola. La puerta es de forjado
Hierro y firme cristal. Del otro lado
Está la casa, oculta y verdadera.
Altos en la penumbra los desiertos
Espejos ven las noches y los días
Y las fotografías de los muertos
Y el tenue ayer de las fotografías.
Alguna vez empujaré la dura
Puerta y haré girar la cerradura.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Gerald Martin: Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

Ariel Gonzalez reviews Gerald Martin's biography of Gabriel García Márquez

Gerald Martin's biography of Gabriel García Márquez suffers from hero worship, but it provides essential insight into this morally myopic man, whose unwavering loyalty to an odious tyrant belies the wisdom and depth of humanity he has demonstrated in his novels and stories.

Notwithstanding the withholding of his formal approval, García Márquez placed no obstacles in Martin's path. Still, Martin had his work cut out for him. García Márquez likes to control his public image, so evasions and exaggerations had to be sifted through to arrive at an approximation of the truth.

Naturally Martin begins in Aracateca, García Márquez's birthplace and the model for his fictional Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the multigenerational epic read by millions on both sides of the equator. ''Gabo,'' as he is generally known, spent his first seven years in this Colombian backwater without his parents, who left him to find their fortune. But he was cared for and doted upon by his maternal grandparents, a pair of born storytellers who regaled him with magically realistic tales of love and war.

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