socialmedian: Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin

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Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin | Book Review

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

Nobel laureate, global bestseller, magical realist and friend of Castro: which is the real Gabriel García Márquez? "Whatever you write," he told Gerald Martin, his biographer, "that is what I will be." Martin's landmark biography, 17 years in the writing, explains at length what García Márquez has meant by insisting that, despite its frequently magical content, his fiction is rooted firmly in real life. That real life, of course, is only as magical as the stories we tell about it, and if Martin has worked hard to separate history from myth- making, he also acknowledges the ways in which they overlap. One of the several family trees reproduced here is that of the Buendías, the fictional dynasty of One Hundred Years of Solitude.