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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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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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)

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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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

T. C. Boyle elects Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude as his book of a lifetime.

It may come as a great shock to my readers to discover that I wasn't always the elegantly dressed, highly attuned citizen of the world they have come to know. Far from it. In fact, for some time I was a quite clearly deranged wild-haired youth dressed in motley and living in hippie squalor in the gatehouse to a castle on the Hudson, in company with three dogs and three glowing specimens of my own species.

I was experiencing nature. And reading. (As well as other things it would be impolite to mention in a family newspaper.) In that period I came across the magical realists of Latin America: Borges, Cortazar, Asturias, Garcia Marquez.

I can still recall the excitement of stretching out my long undernourished frame on a very doggy sofa in front of the fire and coming upon the exquisite opening sentence (which I am quoting from the very copy I then held, which is, as you can imagine, much the worse for wear): "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

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Man Booker International Prize

Mario Vargas Llosa shortlisted for Man Booker International Prize

The short for this year's Prize has just been announced:

Peter Carey (Australia)
Evan S. Connell (USA)
Mahasweta Devi (India)
E.L. Doctorow (USA)
James Kelman (UK)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Arnost Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
Alice Munro (Canada)
V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
Ngugi Wa Thiong'O (Kenya)
Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

The winner will be announced in May.

Interview with Santiago Roncagliolo

Santiago Roncagliolo presented his new novel "Memorias de una dama" in Madrid.

El escritor peruano Santiago Roncagliolo inocula buenas dosis de realidad y de historia en su nueva novela, Memorias de una dama, una obra protagonizada en parte por las mafias que durante décadas dominaron en el Caribe y en la que el autor realiza también una sátira del mundo literario.

"Nos hemos vuelto devoradores de realidad. Hace cuarenta años se podían publicar novelas como Rayuela o Cien años de soledad, pero ahora somos muy escépticos e incrédulos y hay que meter mucha realidad para que todo parezca verdad", afirma Roncagliolo.

Tras haberse convertido en 2006 en el ganador más joven del Premio Alfaguara con Abril rojo y haber publicado dos años antes la novela Pudor, traducida a más de diez idiomas y llevada al cine, Roncagliolo demuestra que en lo literario es ambicioso y hace una apuesta arriesgada en su nuevo libro.

Porque no es fácil combinar en una misma novela las vicisitudes de un joven escritor peruano -alter ego del propio Roncagliolo-, que llega a España "desesperado por entrar en el mundo editorial", con las memorias de una anciana millonaria y decadente, cuyo padre, "un pequeño Berlusconi de los trópicos", como lo define el narrador, fue golpista, fascista, agente de la CIA y hombre de la Cosa Nostra. Y todo ello en el convulso Caribe de los años treinta a los sesenta.

Roncagliolo (Lima, 1975) es consciente de que las dictaduras de Trujillo y de Batista, la revolución cubana de Fidel Castro y la influencia de la CIA y de la mafia en ese período "se conocen más o menos". Y sabe también que hay novelas excelentes sobre algunos de esos episodios, como La fiesta del Chivo, de Vargas Llosa, un escritor que sale a relucir varias veces en Memorias de una dama.

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Paco Ignacio Taibo II: Pancho Villa, roman d'une vie (Pancho Villa: una biografía narrativa)

Sébastien Lapaque reviews Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Pancho Villa, roman d'une vie (Pancho Villa: una biografía narrativa)

Depuis que des conquistadors espagnols ont traversé l'Atlan­tique en emportant le Quichotte dans leurs bagages, l'Amérique latine n'en finit pas de s'inventer des personnages de chevaliers redresseurs de torts. De Simon Bolivar à Hugo Chavez, le fil est romanesque et l'écheveau littéraire. Entre Mexico et Buenos Aires, des millions d'hommes et de femmes soupirent au souvenir de guerriers romantiques et de bandits révolutionnaires droit sortis des grands livres hispaniques.

Romancier prolixe et lecteur passionné de littérature d'aventure, Paco Ignacio Taibo II a naguère magnifié la geste d'Ernesto Che Guevara, «dernier de nos illustres hommes à cheval, si chers à la tradition héroïque de l'Amérique latine» dans une biographie monumentale. Il raconte aujourd'hui Doroteo Arango Arámbula (1878-1923), héros de la révolution mexicaine connu sous le nom de Pancho Villa. Quatre ans de travail ont été nécessaires pour démêler la masse immense des sources et des témoignages. Plus encore que le Che, Pancho Villa a des allures de personnage de fiction. Il a raconté son histoire ; certains l'ont retracée après lui en ajoutant des détails, d'autres ont continué en insérant des chapitres inédits. De sorte qu'il est difficile aujourd'hui de distinguer le rêve et la réalité. «L'historien est bien obligé d'être fasciné par un tel personnage», constate Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Bandolero et voleur de bestiaux à quinze ans, incendiaire et assassin à vingt-cinq, Pancho Villa avait trente-deux ans lorsque ­Francisco Madero, l'apôtre de la révolution, le lança à la conquête de Ciudad Juárez, la plus grande ville de l'État du Chihuahua, posée sur la rive droite du rio Bravo, face à la ville texane d'El Paso. Au même moment, Emiliano Zapata se rendait maître du sud du pays.

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