Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Living to Tell the Tale. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Reason read: Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in March. Read in his honor.
If you like Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a writer, you are going to love his autobiography. What a different world Gabriel Garcia Marquez lived in. From an early age he was exposed to unheard of violence. Imagine! It was common for men (and women) to swagger around with a revolver in their waistbands. The headless horseman still rides through my dreams. Marquez writes with such honesty and clarity it is if you are standing beside him when he is so poor he cannot pay for a copy of his first published story. He needs to ask a reader if he is done with his copy. Time and time again Marquez pulls back the curtain on some of his childhood secrets. Imagine the embarrassment he felt in boarding school knowing he would talk in his sleep.
Living to Tell the Tale is not only a first installment of a man’s autobiography, but it is also a peek into the mind of a budding writer; tales about Marquez’s mother and how she was his first character and her life, his first plot; the starting of a cultural weekly to combine sports with literature. Crawl inside the mind of this extraordinary writer’s mind and you will find a man who cared deeply for perfection. Example: the difference between Madrilenian and Caribbean dialects can alter the text’s meaning considerably. Marquez had copies of such an incorrect edit destroyed.
Living to Tell the Tale only takes the reader up to Marquez’s life in the 1950s when he proposes to his wife, but there are glimpses into his future such as in 1962 when In Evil Hour won a novel competition and he celebrated the birth of his second son.
Questions I wanted to ask – did Marquez grow up to be sexist because, in his culture, women were not allowed in offices and workshops? Or because he learned about sex in an unconventional way (according to him)?
One of the most beautiful phrases in Living to Tell the Tale was when Marquez was building a character in one of his novels. He used a lover from his past saying, “I rescued her from my memory…” (p 234). Here is another phrase I loved, “…I took off the strait jacket of my shyness” (p 337).
Author fact: Marquez was misdiagnosed as having pneumonia when it was actually lymphatic cancer. He later died of pneumonia.
Book trivia: Living to Tell the Tale was supposed to be the first in a three-volume set. the rest of the story never got published.
Setlist: “After the Ball is Over”, “Anapola”, Angel Maria Camacho y Cano, Bach, “Hard Days Night” by the Beatles, Beethoven, Bela Bartok’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch”, Brahms, Carlos Gardel’s “Cuesta abajo”, Chopin, Corelli, Daniel Santos, “El cisne”, Haydn, Joaquin Vega, Maurico Anaias, Migelito Valdes, Mozart, Preludes of Debussy, Schoenberg, Sonora Matancera, Tona lea Negra, Vivaldi, and “When the Ball is Over”.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Hail, Columbia!” (p 90).
~*LunaSea*~ 