Book review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

Published on Friday 21 November 2008 14:25

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A LIFE Gerald Martin Bloomsbury, £25

WHAT, exactly, is the allure of literary biographies? Writers seldom live exceptional lives, and the books they write are usually the result of years of preparation, and a long period of concentrated solitude, an enforced silence. Very occasionally, however, some book will generate such widespread attention, through what John Osborne once called "the blessed alchemy of word of mouth", that it is guaranteed a hungry critical attention. Such books we elevate with time to the status of classics, to be read and re-read, infinitely re-readable. Such books are worlds in themselves – we cannot know too much about them, we want to know just how they came to exist.

A biography that celebrates just such a literary phenomenon is Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life, a 600-page study of the Colombian novelist. His novel, One Hundred Years Of Solitude, published in 1967, is a book that so captivated its readers, first in the Spanish language, and then in tumultuous global translation, that it has made Garcia Marquez our best known living novelist, a literary superstar.

Throughout Latin America especially, the book has been taken to heart as a miraculous compression of the whole history of that continent, unwinding the story of a single rural family through a hundred eventful years, in a village he called Macondo.

To put his life in the smallest of nutshells, Garcia Marquez spent his first eight years in the care of his grandparents in a settlement called Aracataca, in the banana-growing province of Magdalena. (His mother had been allowed by her parents to marry on condition that she leave her firstborn to be raised by them.) The boy's grandfather was his constant companion, his mentor, who read to him from the encyclopedia, and filled him with stories, for he had been a 'coronel' on the Liberal side during the longest of the civil wars that plagued Colombia throughout the 20th century.

His grandmother too would tell him endless anecdotes of dead ancestors as though they still inhabited the house. The busy household was populated by a variety of aunts, and visitors who were always arriving, full of stories. These stories stayed forever embedded in the child's head, a first awareness that saw no difference between magical happenings and those of the everyday. Fifteen years later, when he returned with his mother to sell the house of his grandparents, the house that had been his whole world had fallen into decline, and he realised that now it existed only in his head, enclosed in all its stories, remembered and imagined. His determination to recover that lost world turned him into a writer.

He was already working in journalism, for which he had a storyteller's aptitude; but he remained haunted by the obligation to bring that time to written life, an obligation that dogged him through years of peripatetic journalism and literary beginnings, until, approaching the age of 40 and living with his wife and children in Mexico City, the book seemed to arrive complete in his head. Over a period of 18 months, and going deep into debt, he immersed himself in writing his version of the magical microcosm of his early years, restoring it to written life. The biography describes in detail how, when he went with his wife to post the finished manuscript of One Hundred Years Of Solitude to the expectant publisher in Buenos Aires, they did not have enough money to pay the postage, and could send only the first half.

The book, illuminated by his abundant imagination and the beautiful precision of his storytelling, became an overnight sensation, and eventually won for him, in 1982, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and brought him both wealth and fame. Most importantly, success did not deter him from pursuing his extraordinary writing career, and the remarkable novels that followed – The Autumn Of The Patriarch and Love In The Time Of Cholera – further endeared him to legions of readers, who look on him almost as a personal friend.

Literary biographies are very often posthumous studies, involving considerable burrowing for clues. Garcia Marquez, happily, is still with us, in his 82nd year, and still writing, welcomed everywhere, and treated almost as an oracle. Gerald Martin has spent the past 17 years putting together, with infinite patience, the details of his subject's crowded life, and has had the advantage of a long friendship with Garcia Marquez himself, and ready access to friends and family. More than that, he has a deep knowledge of the language, literature, and history, not just of Colombia, but of the whole Latin American continent. His patience is limitless, his judgments scrupulous, and his readings of Garcia Marquez's writings crackle with intelligence.

His biography reminds us frequently that Garcia Marquez is above all a storyteller. He has written and rewritten parts of his life in his extraordinary fictions. What he has known from an early age is that stories are our way of humanising our world, of bringing it into equilibrium, as he did his so vividly. The biography is as much tribute as it is study – Martin is a warm guide, and a wise one. What it does almost require, however, is that its readers are already familiar with One Hundred Years Of Solitude, and thirsty to know more of just how it came into being. Or at least will soon be.

I read the first chapter of One Hundred Years Of Solitude in typescript in 1966, before the book was published, and have been bewitched by it ever since, as Garcia Marquez says he was while writing it. I have read the novel countless times, and go back to it often; and, I have to say that, after relishing this generous and graceful biography, I look forward to reading it again, freshly and very soon. v