Living to Tell the Tale Hardcover - 2003

From the jacket flap

In this long-awaited first volume of a planned trilogy, the most acclaimed and revered living Nobel laureate begins to tell us the story of his life.
Like all his work, "Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Gabriel Garcia Marquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the shape, the quality, and the vividness of a conversation with the reader--a tale of people, places, and events as they occur to him: the colorful stories of his eccentric family members; the great influence of his mother and maternal grandfather; his consuming career in journalism, and the friends and mentors who encouraged him; the myths and mysteries of his beloved Colombia; personal details, undisclosed until now, that would appear later, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction; and, above all, his fervent desire to become a writer. And, as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at the heart of a life--in this instance, his own. "Living to Tell the Tale is a radiant, powerful, and beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a writer and as a man.

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 10/15/2003, Page 354
• Booklist Editors Choice/Adult, 01/01/2004, Page 773
• BookPage, 11/01/2003, Page 6
• Choice, 05/01/2004, Page 1670
• Commonweal, 03/26/2004, Page 21
• Library Journal, 07/01/2003, Page 0
• Library Journal Prepub Alert, 07/01/2003, Page 59
• LJ Best Books of Year, 01/01/2004, Page 49
• New York Review of Books, 01/15/2004, Page 20
• New York Times, 12/07/2003, Page 59
• Newsweek, 11/10/2003, Page 65
• People Weekly, 12/08/2003, Page 55
• Poder Hispanic, 12/01/2003, Page 68
• USA Today, 12/03/2003, Page 1
• Vanity Fair, 12/01/2003, Page 114