BIOGRAPHY: This life of South American writer Gabriel García Márquez radiates an infectious charm and humanity, writes Ian Thomson
EVERY TIME I HEAR the words "magical realism" I want to reach for my revolver. Back in the 1970s, copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, appeared in student bedsits more dependably than rising damp or posters of Jimi Hendrix (often with the back cover torn for marijuana spliffs). First published in 1967, the glittery Colombian saga went on to spawn countless imitations, but now it seems that even García Márquez has grown weary of his "magical" example.
In recent years, he has concentrated on books of fictionalised journalism - realism without the magic. (One of these told a real-life drama from Pinochet's Chile; another a kidnapping by Colombian cocaine traffickers in Medellin.) In 2001, surprisingly for such a private man, García Márquez published the first volume of a projected three-part autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, which told of his childhood on the east coast of Colombia and subsequent education in the capital, Bogota, at the fiercely Jesuit Colegio San José.
Undoubtedly, García Márquez is a difficult subject for a biographer. He has contrived some elaborate autobiographical fictions, and is noted for his determination to keep secret what he wishes to keep secret. Gerald Martin, a professor of Caribbean studies in London, has devoted 17 years to researching and writing the Colombian author's biography, and is aware of how fantastically difficult it is to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of anyone's life. Yet, with Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, he has succeeded triumphantly. The book is distinguished by its pages of hard-won clarity, its imaginative sympathy and a welcome absence of any psychoanalytic theorising.
García Márquez was born in 1928 in an old Indian settlement north of Bogota. His father worked for the United Fruit Company (which succeeded in reducing Honduras to such a state of corruption that it earned the original title of "banana republic"). The Boston-based company had interests in the future writer's native Aracataca, and the illusion of a banana bonanza was allowed to grow as the "violent frontier town" (as Martin calls it) sprawled across railroad tracks.
Rightly, Martin insists on Aracataca's Caribbean identity, its piquant foodstuffs and Afro-Hispanic dialect being a legacy of Atlantic slavery. (García Márquez himself has always associated the "fragrant aroma" of Caribbean guava fruit with his childhood.) According to family legend, his antecedents came to Colombia by way of Venezuela in the early 19th century. From his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, Gabriel ("Gabo") would inherit a lifelong adoration of Simón Bolivar, the Venezuela-born hero of South American independence and the subject of one of his finest books, The General in His Labyrinth.
After training as a lawyer in Bogota, García Márquez became a journalist. His earliest reportage appeared in Colombia's Liberal El Espectador and in 1955 the newspaper's circulation doubled thanks to just one of his contributions. García Márquez's 14-part account of a Colombian sailor's ordeal on being swept off a destroyer into the Caribbean Sea was mesmerically readable as well as politically devastating. While coaxing details out of the "shipwrecked sailor", García Márquez established that the destroyer was carrying contraband refrigerators and TV sets.
The Colombian government, under the dictatorship of General Pinilla, unhappy with this and other revelations, eventually closed El Espectador down. Much of García Márquez's later writing would likewise mingle journalism with a creative immersion in the subject. (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, one of his most influential titles, has been used in countless newspaper headlines.)
In 1982, when accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, García Márquez turned up at Stockholm in a man-of-the-people bush jacket and pair of Cuban-heeled cowboy boots. By that time he had acquired an elder statesman image; journalists photographed him in the company of Fidel Castro, Gorbachev and Mitterand, a wealthy man with seven homes in glamorous locations in five different countries, who was read by millions of people of different backgrounds and cultures.
In recounting García Márquez's story, Martin provides an excellent account of the rise to literary fame of other "magical realists" from Latin America. In the 1960s and 1970s Europe was seemingly flooded with phantasmagoric novels by Colombians and Cubans. The authors - Casteneda, Carpentier, Cortazar - were fashionable but often overrated.
'García Márquez has proved easily the most enduring among them. The musically sensuous prose of his fiction, together with its fairy-tale atmosphere of enchantment, can sometimes dwindle to morbid sensuality or (as in his last, disappointing novel, Memories of my Melancholy Whores) mere hot-house purple patchery. Yet Gabriel García Márquez is now unquestionably the most famous writer in the Spanish-speaking world since Cervantes. Gerald Martin is to be congratulated on this polished (I almost said "magical") biography, which radiates an infectious charm and humanity.
• Ian Thomson's The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica will be published by Faber next year