Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Life
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
The first comprehensive biography of the author of One Hundred Years Solitude and Love in a Time of Cholera - the most popular international novelist of the last fifty years.
'Gabriel García Márquez once remarked that "every self-respecting writer should have an English biographer". He could have asked for none more accomplished than Gerald Martin' Financial Times
Gabriel García Márquez, author of the modern classic One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, is one of the greatest and most popular writers of the late-twentieth century.
As Gerald Martin tells the story of the author's fascinating rise to wealth and international fame, he reveals the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing, and between power, solitude and love. Interviewing more than three hundred people including Fidel Castro, Felipe González, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the author's large family as well as 'Gabo' himself, Martin immerses himself in García Márquez's world.
This at first 'tolerated' and now 'official' biography is as gripping and revealing as the writer's journalism and as complex and involving as any of his fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Martin's control of his prodigious material in this first authorized biography of the great Colombian novelist Garc a M rquez is astonishing. Martin (Journeys Through the Labyrinth) writes with a novelist's momentum. His descriptions of Garc a M rquez's hometown, Aracataca (fictionalized as Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude), are atmospheric without being cloying; he conducts literary exegesis deftly, like a detective hunting for clues. From isolated youth to shabby college man in thrall to Kafka and Woolf, the "sexual reprobate" and the Nobel Prize laureate, grounded by his marriage and community of fellow writers and friends, and by turns publicly aloof and loquacious, Garc a M rquez seems to be many different men, but his biographer handles the contradictions with finesse. Almost entirely laudatory, the biography addresses the controversies which generally orbit the politicized Garc a M rquez gingerly if at all, and renders his off-putting traits endearing. Martin has come to praise Garc a M rquez whom he regards as the one writer who has been as artistically influential as the early modernists (in pioneering magical realism, now a staple in fiction from the developing world) and positively Dickensian in his popular appeal. 16 pages of photos, 3 maps.
