Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Autobiography “Living to Tell the Tale”

GABRIEL Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel-prize winning novelist, left behind one last gift for his readers and devotees before his death in 2013: his autobiography, "Living to Tell the Tale" where he recounts in his inimitable style his early life, particularly his beginnings as a writer, and the political landscape of his war-torn country. The book came out in 2002 in Spanish, and in the following year it was deftly translated into English by Edith Grossman, who is also the translator of his earlier masterpiece, "Love in the Time of Cholera". 

The first scene in the book is Garcia Marquez's encounter at the age of 23 with his mother who travelled to Bogota and asked him to accompany her to his birthplace, Aracataca, with the mission to sell their ancestral home. This arduous journey and his conversations with his mother set the tone and the mood for this non-fiction which is as mesmerizing as his novels.  At the very outset, Garcia Marquez describes in detail how he had disappointed his father when he quit his legal studies to become a writer. Throughout the book, his transformation from an indifferent student to a world-class writer is a recurring theme which Garcia Marquez builds up in a loving and convincing fashion. During their travel to Aracataca, his mother questioned him persistently about his plans for the future in light of his reluctance to finish law school at the Universidad Nacional. Finally, before she returned, she tried one last time: 

"So, what shall I tell your papa?"

"Tell him I love him very much and that thanks to him I'm going to be a writer.  Nothing but a writer", he proclaims.

More than half a century later, he waxes nostalgic as he reminisces about that incident and its aftermath.  

"From then on I did not earn a centavo except with the typewriter. . . Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer."

The book offers a tour of the realms he inhabited, his first steps as a writer, early work, his formative years in school and his first job.  For a student of geopolitical history he paints a bleak picture of Colombia after the World War II ended and how that shaped his beliefs and credo. The blurb of the book indicates that this is the first volume of a planned trilogy, and covers the period from his birth to his trip to Geneva in 1955 ostensibly to cover an international conference but in reality on the advice of friends to avoid death threats from the military following the publication of some investigative reporting he did for the newspaper El Espectador. Unfortunately, since his passing, his publishers have not announced any additional publication from him, and it is not known whether Garcia Marquez had left some unfinished manuscript before his death. However, since his rise to international fame in the 1970s, many other scholarly books and research papers, many of them based on interviews with the Maestro, have addressed his life, writing, political sympathies, and his inspirations. 

One of the lacunae in this book, and one could only guess that he was meaning to fill the gap later, is any account of the period when he wrote his magnum opus, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (OHYS). To be fair to him, and fortunately for the readers, he does refer to his inspirations for the name Macondo, some of the main characters, and various episodes in the book, including the Banana Strike Massacre perpetrated by the United Fruit Company. One of his biographers had earlier referred to the period when Garcia Marquez had a writer's block prior to writing OHYS, but very little is known about the creative process while the book was cooking, so to speak, which he identifies as 1965-66.   

Another mystery that will remain so for a reader is the impact of the many secrets revealed in the autobiography on the two most important women in his life, his mother and wife.  He candidly confesses his inability to keep his hands off of women of all ages and shades, a character trait that he calls a "persistent addiction", and the adulterous lifestyle he had led in all the cities where he lived in his younger days, Sucre, Cartagena, Bogota, and Barranquilla. One of his most lasting relationships during this period involved a twenty year old woman named Matilde, whom he nicknamed Nigromanta, in Sucre, whose husband was a police officer and threatened to kill him if caught in his bed after the first time. A few years later after Matilde became a widow, he resumed his trysts with her only to be caught red-handed by his mother.  He also does not fail to lay out in charming detail why he fondly remembered the time when he cohabitated with women of loose morals, and considered the brothels of Tesca more hospitable then the tourist hotels. He lyrically describes one of his paramours thus: "One of them, whose name and measurements I remember very well, let herself be seduced by the fantasies I recounted while I was asleep".  It is a fair speculation that the characters in his last novel "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" were inspired by his first-hand experience of the red-light areas he frequented during his youth. His relationship with his mother, and his ability to see her strengths and weaknesses are revealed with great finesse, and it appears that she understood and forgave his gerrymandering lifestyle. However he does not reveal much about his wife of almost sixty years, Mercedes Barcha, except for two important aspects of their relationship: his supposed proposal to her when she was only thirteen and a few glimpses of their magical courtship, and his final entreaty before he left Colombia at the age of 27. It was during this time that Mercedes was reputed to have said, "My papa says that the prince who will marry me hasn't been born yet" to dodge his embrace.  Finally, out of exasperation, before he left for Europe, he wrote a note ending it with the dramatic gambit, "If I do not receive an answer to this letter within a month, I will stay and live in Europe forever".

Nonetheless, his followers will admire his ethos of hard work from an early age ("I would write for as many as ten hours straight in a remote corner without talking to anyone"), his insatiable ability to read great writers and acknowledge his debt to them (Faulkner, James Joyce, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Andre Gide among others), and mostly his single-minded pursuit of the task at hand. He was also not hesitant to offer details of his bare-knuckle upbringing and own up to his weaknesses. In many instances he alludes to his family's poverty, shortage of money, and his own struggles in the "abyss of poverty". He writes ,"the first royalties that allowed me to live on my stories and novels were paid to me when I was in my forties, after I had published four books with the most abject earnings". 

Garcia Marquez was witness to some of the most tumultuous events in Colombian history and recorded many of the brutalities in his books. In this autobiography, he provides a detailed account of the assassination of the leftist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitin on April 9, 1948, and the mayhem that followed. It is similar in scope and circumstances to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in India. Another incident from an earlier time figures in many of his books, the Banana Strike Massacre which occurred one year after he was born in 1928. He refers to the killing of plantation workers by United Fruit Company in both OHYS and Love in the Time of Cholera (LTC) to convey the immensity of that event in the history and political consciousness of Colombia.

For readers of Garcia Marquez, who have wondered how on earth did he invent the characters, you have to read his autobiography.  A must also for all journalists: how he started writing, his passion for writing and ability to produce on time and on demand, and a critical eye for details and drama. His account of a shipwreck (published later as a book ("The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor") which displays his tenacity and ability to unearth the truth is one that any working journalist will draw inspiration from. The time line of Garcia Marquez's life story is very well known, but for his avid readers and admirers of his style of writing which is enriched by doses of "magical realism", the interesting aspects of the autobiography are his experience and the influences that shape his writing career. 

Finally, a word about the quality of the translation. In an interview in 1990, Gabriel García Márquez  offered the "unprecedented compliment" to his translators Edith Grossman (who also translated LTC) and Gregory Rabassa (who translated OHYS) when he revealed that he prefers reading his own novels in their English translation.

Dr. Abdullah Shibli is an avid reader of world literature and a frequent contributor to The Daily Star.