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Loading... Living to Tell the Taleby Gabriel García Márquez
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  r1hard | Nov 22, 2009 |  Not as good as one would expect from such an erudite writer (  ) AnneliM | Jun 19, 2008 | The first chapter (until p. 72) and the second (until 135) were almost boring. Once into chapter 3 however, there's a recognizable main character and the book becomes definitely fun to read. García Márquez's expressive power and almost effortless ingratiated writing pervade the tale of a poor, expansive and focused life. A worthy read for everybody interested in journalism, Colombian politics in the first half of the XXth century or just plain good literature. (  ) alv | Dec 8, 2007 | Marit | Oct 4, 2007 | So many interesting things happen to this man! It is easy to see why he is such a great writer - he has so much to draw from. I am amazed that his novels include so much from his real life. ( ) akritz | Jul 17, 2007 | 
 García Márquez's new book, a memoir called ''Living to Tell the Tale,'' reminds us that what seems so fantastical in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude'' is in fact a reasonable description of Colombia, where ghosts are still central to workaday life and the successor to the civil war depicted in the novel rages to this very day. ''Living to Tell the Tale'' -- a title that conjures memories of ''Moby- Dick,'' as well as this Nobel laureate's own nonfiction book ''The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor'' -- is the first volume of a planned autobiographical trilogy. But its most powerful sections read like one of his mesmerizing novels, transporting the reader to a Latin America haunted by the ghosts of history and shaped by the exigencies of its daunting geography, by its heat and jungles and febrile light.
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Echoing Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Márquez uses his memoir as justification for telling an artful story that challenges notions of authoritative record or chronology. Time is porous in Márquez's Colombia, flowing back and forth among the mythic moments of his personal history to accommodate his fascination for place. While recalling a trip he took as an adult to his grandparents' house in Aracataca, he veers suddenly back to childhood and his earliest infant memories in that house. Nearly one hundred pages have passed before he returns effortlessly to the pivotal moment on the trip when he declares to himself and family: "I'm going to be a writer... Nothing but a writer.'
Similarly, Márquez toys with the boundaries of truth and fiction throughout his book. He acknowledges that his memory is often faulty, especially with regards to his crucial, formative years with his grandparents. And his explorations of key moments in his life show that, despite his vivid mental snapshots, the events were often temporally impossible. Further, he colors his tale with recollections of ghostly presences and occult events that pass without a wink into his narrative, alongside the documented accounts of his early successes as a poet and singer or details of his first published writings.
With its play on time and truth, memory and storytelling, Living to Tell the Tale's literary form acts as early evidence for Márquez's inevitable calling as a writer, and the language of Edith Grossman's translation, which frequently skirts the boundaries of poetry, mirrors Márquez's effort. While he meanders on his picaresque artistic journey--distracted by trysts with a married woman, the tumult of Colombian politics, and the raw energy of the journalist's life--he ends this first volume with the tantalizing promise of the literary career about to explode, and the impossible prospect of even greater riches for his readers. --Patrick O’Kelley
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:53 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
Einen Einblick in sein Leben gewährt dieses Buch. Allerdings muss man bereit sein sich durch eine viel zu hoch dosierte Ansammlung von Namen zu quälen.
Laureano Gomez, Alberto Lleras, Ospina Perez,Guillermo Leon Valencia, Dario Echandia und Gaitan sind zum Beispiel Namen die nur auf einer Seite (S.360) aufgeführt werden. Dieser Namenswahnsinn durchzieht das ganze Buch.
Die meisten erwähnten Menschen sind literarisch oder politisch sicherlich bedeutsam, ich kannte den Großteil jedoch nicht.
Marquezs Fähigkeit so wunderbare Geschichten zu erzählen taucht in diesem Buch in verschiedenen Episoden immer wieder auf, ist aber für 604 Seiten viel zu knapp ausgefallen.
So ist dieses Buch leider keines, das ich verschenken oder gar noch mal lesen werde.