More than one million copies of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoirs have been published ahead of their release this week in Latin America and Spain — a testament to the enduring popularity of the pioneer of magical realism.
”Vivir para Contarla” (Live to Tell It) hit bookstores Tuesday night in the writer’s native Colombia as the national anthem blared over speakers in book stores. The 74-year-old Garcia Marquez, who has lymphatic cancer and lives most of the year in Mexico City, did not plan to attend. President Alvaro Uribe was set to attend the launching, but canceled.
In the memoirs — the first installment of a planned three-volume series — Garcia Marquez revisits the place of his birth: Aracataca, a steamy town in the shadow of a snowcapped mountain. Garcia Marquez writes that, as a young boy, he dreamed of making snowballs from the inaccessible snows of the mountain.
Aracataca is the model for the fantastical town of Macondo in ”One Hundred Years of Solitude,” his most famous novel. It was in Aracataca that Garcia Marquez decided to try to make a living being a journalist and an author. He wrote several international best sellers, including ”Love in the Time of Cholera” and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
”Live to Tell It” covers the years of his life through 1955. At times fanciful, the book also delves into the violence that has marred much of Colombian history, describing the massacre of hundreds of bananas workers in 1928 by the Colombian army during labour unrest at United Fruit Company. Garcia Marquez — who is a close friend of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and who for years was refused a US visa — seems to harbour bitter feelings toward the American banana company.
When United Fruit abandoned its operations in Colombia, Garcia Marquez writes, the Americans ”took everything: the money, the breezes of December, the bread knives, the afternoon thunderstorms, the aroma of jasmine flowers, love.”
English, German and French translations of the memoirs are underway, said Claudio Lopez de Lamadrid, editor of Mondadori, a publishing house in Barcelona, which is publishing the book in Spain.
Much of the 579-page autobiography is dedicated to Garcia Marquez’s passion: journalism, and recounts his days in the Colombian newspapers El Espectador, El Heraldo and El Universal, where he honed his narrative technique.
Like his earlier works, his memoirs are expected to be a best seller. Popular books in Colombia often wind up being pirated and sold on street corners. Law enforcement officials are on the alert for any pirated copies of the book, which in Colombia will sell for 49 000 pesos ($17). – Sapa-AP