Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate for literature, has always been a mystery. His life was as magical as his novels. But some of that mystery might be unraveled by biographist Gerald Martin, whose new book Garcia Marquez: A Life (642pp, Alfred A. Knopf, $37.50) makes a fantastic addition to Marquez’s autobiographyLiving to Tell the Tale.
Marquez was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small, mostly illiterate town in Colombia’s Costa region: the banana zone. His father, an unrepentant womanizer, dragged his mother across Colombia in search of easy fortune. Little Gabriel was left to the care of hi maternal grandparents. At age 22 in February 1950, he again went to his grandfather’s house in the backwoods in the company of his mother ╰he most thrilling event in the novelist’s life.“Every single day of my life,?Marquez recalled decades later, “I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I’ve dreamed I’m in that huge old house.’” He listened attentively to tales about the War of a Thousand Days between the Conservs and Liberals and the 1928 massacre of workers at the banana plantation. He read Alexander Dumas and A Thousand and One Nights. He also watched as his grandfather soldered goldfish trinkets to sell in the neighborhood.
Marquez eventually returned to his parents, attended boarding school in Bogota and took great fancy in reading works of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Proust in translation. He came to appreciate “the multiple dimensons of time itself.” He met and fell in love with Mercedes Barcha, then age 9, and would propose to her 16 years later.He got a scholarship to attend an excellent college outside Bogota where he read Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario of the early modernist movement. He spent years working as a journalist, becoming Colombia’s first movie critic. When he finally finishedOne Hundred Years of Solitude, he and Mercedes were too poor to pay for stamps and could only afford to send half the manuscript to the publisher.
