Excellent Biography on Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Latin American Master Novelist

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

Gabriel García Márquez: A Lifewill delight anyone interested in a novelist whose acclaim and appeal have been matched by his transforming influence on contemporary literature.

Gerald Martin's biography, a towering achievement of Latin American literary studies, reads beautifully, almost like a novel.

Painstakingly researched over 17 years, the book abounds with fresh discoveries based on information Martin gathered in interviews with García Márquez and many others, and on close readings of all the novels, and of many other published and unpublished writings.

With meticulous care, unusual clarity and a magnificent power of synthesis, Martin describes the constellation of historical, family, personal and cultural circumstances that made it possible for a Colombian writer, born in a marginalized coastal province of his country, to fuse Modernist literature (Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Borges and others) with the rhythms and rhymes of Caribbean popular culture.

Martin shows how García Márquez gained the wherewithal to address the human complexities of the Latin American experience with irony, humor and flair, creating a world of fantasy, and a distinctive literary mode, known as magical realism.

Martin is a sympathetic biographer, more demanding on himself than on his subject: He is frank about what he was not able to discover regarding a guarded writer for whom the wildest literary imagination was never incompatible with his own sense of honesty or historical truth, and who did not take it kindly when anyone doubted the underlying veracity of his embellishments.

Read the rest of the review here, or grab a copy of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life now!

Related Books, Author Interviews, and Writing Jobs by Keyword

Use the Search Function at the Top to find Other Books and Author Interviews