Living to Tell the Tale

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The British Council for Refugees gave Hung a scholarship to study English in Saffron Walden. In the holidays he went on a trip with his mother to visit relatives in America. They encouraged him to apply for medical school there and he was accepted. “So I stayed,” he said. “I became a foreign student from England,” he added, laughing at the thought. After his medical degree, he studied for an MBA and in time did well out of the considerable overlap between medicine and business in the US. She interrupted the discussion, not because my arguments had defeated her but because she wanted to use the toilet and did not trust the state of its hygiene. I spoke to the bosun to find out if there was a more sanitary place, but he explained that he himself used the public lavatory. And concluded, as if he had just been reading Conrad: "At sea we are all equal." And so my mother submitted to the law of equality. Contrary to what I had feared, when she came out it was all she could do to control her laughter. He is perhaps the most acclaimed, revered and widely read writer of our time, and in this first volume of a planned trilogy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins to tell the story of his life. Living to Tell the Tale spans Marquez’s life from his birth in 1927 through the beginning of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It is a tale of people, places and events as they occur to him: family, work, politics, books and music, his beloved Colombia, parts of his history until now undisclosed and incidents that would later appear, transmuted and transposed in his fiction. A vivid, powerful, beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Marquez as a writer and as a man. Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez – eBook Details

A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn't find. A thrilling miracle of a book' The Times García Márquez is at a crossroads, having just abandoned his law studies and now spending all his time reading and writing -- but not having established himself as the sort of writer he wants to be yet. Which is why the flow of refugees from Syria to Europe has resonance for the former boat people. “I cried when I saw the news about Germany taking all those refugees,” said Huy. “I was quite surprised they were that open to that many people. I was really moved by what the Germans did. I think the British could have done more.” The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, writing at the other end of the continent and with very different literary preoccupations, once remarked sniffily of One Hundred Years of Solitude: "The first 50 years aren't bad at all". This first part of García Márquez's life story arouses a similar feeling. His determination to name everything and everyone of importance to him can make the book heavy going. It is when he writes of his mother and the Caribbean world that has been so influential in his life and writing that García Márquez's prose comes to life and sparkles in a way that makes the reader all the more eager to return to the world of his fiction.

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From his early childhood in a female-dominated household through schooling that barely interested him (as he sat through his classes with an open book on his knees, constantly reading) it was an odd and yet convincing sort of childhood idyll. Q: What do you find to be most challenging and most rewarding about translating García Márquez’s books?

For several years García Márquez has been fighting cancer. This struggle has made it hard for him to continue creating his imaginary worlds - the English version of his last novel, Of Love and Other Demons, dates from 1995. Instead, his efforts have gone almost exclusively into the search for the lived reality behind the fiction: the somewhat ominously titled Living to Tell the Tale is the first volume of three he has planned. Q: What do you learn about Spanish-language/Latin American literature when you translate García Márquez? The greatest surprise to his followers may be the discovery of how little his fiction has strayed from the facts of his early years: both Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude are imaginative evocations of his family's early history; No One Writes to the Colonel is based almost entirely on his grandfather's last years; for Love in the Time of Cholera he appropriated the tales of youthful romance endlessly retold by his parents. It may be simply that García Márquez's recollections of his life are now tinged by his fiction. In any case, the two seem to have become inextricable to him. 'I could not,' he confesses, 'distinguish between life and poetry.'

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So there it was, the inferno I feared so much. She began as she always did, when you least expected it, in a soothing voice that nothing could agitate. Only for the sake of the ritual, since I knew very well what the answer would be, I asked: Hung took his four children, then aged 10 to 16. “I told them: ‘If it wasn’t for these people you wouldn’t be here. None of us would be here.’ I didn't marry until I had my parents' blessing," she said. "Unwilling, I grant you, but I had it." This memoir may not win over those who have resisted being persuaded that Mr García Márquez is a great, rather than a very good, writer. His style is one of much poetry but sometimes less meaning than meets the eye (.....) But most readers will not mind. They will simply enjoy the anecdotes and the prose of a master of the narrative art and of the Spanish language." - The Economist The family was always poor and struggling, but the struggle was taken as a given and everyone simply managed as best they could.