Michael Jacobs
Colombian Tales
Appropriately, for one of the biggest literary egos of modern times, the longest book Gabriel García Márquez has ever written is his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale. This is a work that begins not with the birth of the great Colombian writer but with the youthful journey he made with his mother to sell the Márquez family home at Aracataca (the future ‘Macondo’). All this serves as a clever literary device to bring together key elements that went into the writing of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude: a family history of abandonment, illegitimacy and poverty set against a background of passionate crimes, near magical occurrences, continual political upheaval, and the appalling consequences of the strike by United Fruit Company workers.
Living to Tell the Tale ends abruptly with the 28-year-old Márquez’s move to Europe and his simultaneous decision to marry the woman whom he has left behind in Colombia, Mercedes Barcha, whose potential as a wife he supposedly spotted when
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553