Memoir: The first part of Gabriel García Márquez's autobiographical trilogy is a treasure trove of stories, writes Michael Smith.
This latest offering from Gabriel García Márquez, the first of a projected trilogy, we are told, is autobiographical rather than an autobiography, at least in the conventional sense. The distinction is important. Any attempt by the reader to establish chronology, or the chronological development of a life, will be frustrated by the author's novelistic to-and-froing in time and experience. It is therefore best read as an evocation of the key experiences of the Columbian period of Márquez's life. Apart from its intrinsic interest and its gloriously fluent writing, it provides a background to Márquez's fictions that no scholar, however knowledgeable in Latin American studies, could supply.
Although Márquez's name is inextricably bound up with magic realism, a genre he didn't invent (although he gave it its international recognition and acclaim), his writing has outlived that fashion and his One Hundred Years of Solitude (his major masterpiece) and No One Writes to the Colonel (his minor masterpiece) stand as two of the great works of fiction of modern times, studied by scholars and students and read by general readers everywhere. Indeed, it is hard to think of another author whose work is at the same time so widely and learnedly studied and so immensely popular. His receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 was, without exception, perceived as an honour to the prize as much as to Márquez himself.
Márquez refers to his extended family as "the tribe", and its complex make-up is way beyond anything most of us would think of as a family, however extended. To give even the briefest summary of it would take up this whole review. Its members dominate Living to Tell the Tale, especially its first two sections. Until he was eight, Márquez, his parents' firstborn, was reared by his maternal grandparents in the small Columbian town of Aracataca, his mother having gone off with her husband (of whom her family disapproved) to live elsewhere and to have 10 more children. These first eight years supplied Márquez with a great deal of the material he would transmute into his fiction. His grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, kept a large house in the town. He is the eponymous Colonel of Márquez's short novel. A wonderfully eccentric character, he assumed a mythic dimension in Márquez's memory. He had killed a man in a duel of honour, and that death was to haunt him all his life.
Here is one of Márquez's comments on the grandparents' house in Aracataca:
I cannot imagine a family environment more favourable to my vocation than that lunatic house, in particular because of the character of the numerous women who reared me. My grandfather and I were the only males, and he initiated me into the sad reality of adults with tales of bloody battles and a scholar's explanation of the flight of birds and claps of thunder at dusk, and he encouraged me in my fondness for drawing.
Although Márquez's father, almost as colourful a character as the Colonel, was to play a significant role in the novelist's life, it is his mother, Luisa Santiaga, who is the major figure after the Colonel. Reared in middle-class gentility, her social decline into poverty through her marriage did not defeat her but turned her into a pillar of strength. How she coped with the economic shambles of her life is the exemplary virtue in much of her son's fiction. He writes:
The poverty of my parents in Barranquilla was exhausting, but it allowed me the good fortune of establishing an exceptional relationship with my mother. More than the expected filial love, I felt an astounding admiration for her because she had the character of a lioness, silent but fierce when faced with adversity, and a relationship with God that seemed more combative than submissive: two exemplary virtues that imbued her life with a confidence that never failed.
In portraying his family life, Márquez is sometimes self-indulgent, and for readers not familiar with his writing this can be confusing and even tiresome. But embedded in all of this one finds anecdotal gems comparable to the best scenes of the fiction. Indeed, the book is a treasure trove of stories, as one would expect of Márquez. There is, for example, the teenage Márquez's accidental sexual initiation in a local brothel, in which humour redeems squalor. There is the story of the child's introduction to the dictionary by his grandfather, a key experience in the life of the writer. There is the story of what was known as the "Black Night of Aracataca" that recalls a legendary slaughter in which people were murdered simply because of their accent.
Living to Tell the Tale is a richly human book that is of a piece with Márquez's fiction. Poverty, disappointment, sickness, death and all the other adversities that threaten to overwhelm the human spirit can be combated by the inventiveness and transmutational power of the imagination. Without imagination, reality can be unbearable. But this is no facile escapism. Márquez's writing is an encouragement to live, to be generous, to be tolerant. Its ultimate lesson is the indomitability of the human spirit. As the Colonel of his short novel protests, when encouraged to give up his fight against the disappointments of his life: "It is never too late for anything." At 76, embarking on this long journey into his past, Márquez splendidly reaffirms the belief of his Colonel.
Finally, let me say that Edith Grossman's translation competently matches the magniloquence of the original.
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and critic. His latest book is The Tamarit Poems, a translation of Lorca's Diván del Tamarit
Living to Tell the Tale. By Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman, Jonathan Cape, 484pp. £18.99