Living to Tell the Tale (Saleh Almani Translation)

In this literary masterpiece Márquez recounts the story of his life from his birth in 1927, through his school years when the writer’s personality emerged, then the beginnings of his writing project, up to a decisive moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. In this memoir we discover how the magic that marked Márquez’s work has its roots in the eccentricity of his family members and in the great influence of his mother and grandfather. We learn of his gruelling period of work in journalism, which never ceased to attract him, of the friends and teachers who encouraged and supported him, and of the legends and secrets surrounding his beloved Colombia. We come to know the details of Márquez’s character that would reveal themselves to us later, and above all we realise that throughout his life he was possessed by a burning desire to become a writer. As in Márquez’s fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of our living world, through whom the emotions and desires lying deep within life are clarified and defined, and that life, in this book, is his own.