Living to Tell the Tale (review)

Abstract

In 1951 Gabriel García Márquez, hard at work on his first novel, was offered some unusual advice by a much-younger brother: " 'the first thing a writer ought to write is his memoirs, when he can still remember everything.' " Author of such acclaimed novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1988), and progenitor of what has come to be known as magical realism, García Márquez is also endowed with a memory both expansive and meticulous. His long-awaited memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, the first in a planned autobiographical trilogy, is a richly imagined volume, brimming with lush description and historical immediacy. And if the author has, over the course of his seventy-five magical years, succumbed to those ineluctable lapses in memory, we're certainly none the wiser. And it wouldn't matter anyway: as García Márquez writes in the book's epigraph, "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." Unlike many contemporary autobiographies, this one does not indulge in postmodern fripperies. Instead, García Márquez offers a "traditional" memoir: one recounted through the first-person in the past tense, in a voice both warm and conversational. Told from the author's contemporary vantage, looking back on the early years of his life, Living to Tell the Tale is an account of the author's development from a shy young boy into a working journalist, published short-story writer, and burgeoning novelist. As straightforward a memoir as García Márquez's may seem to be, progression through the story of the author's life is hardly chronological; he eloquently captures the asynchronies of memory through deft temporal shifts - from adulthood to adolescence, or from childhood deep into family history - that bring to mind similar ones in many of his most well-known novels. In fact, the book opens not with the author's birth, as might be expected, but, novelistically, in medias res, at a point of emotional and artistic crisis in the young man's life. Having dropped out of law school, García Márquez is struggling to make ends meet as a journalist in a ramshackle Caribbean town. In spite of all his efforts, he is floundering: I was convinced my bad luck was congenital and irremediable, above all with women and with money, but I did not care, because I believed I did not need good luck in order to write well. I did not care about glory, or money, or old age, because I was sure I was going to die very young, and in the street. The unexpected arrival of his mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez, in Baranquilla saves him from such a sordid fate. He writes: "The trip with my mother . . . rescued me from that abyss." Convincing her son to return with her to Aracataca, her motivations are twofold. Desperate for money, [End Page 189] she wants her son to help her sell the ancestral house in which he lived until he was eight; yet his mother has also come to persuade him to abandon his penurious life as a struggling writer and return to law school, as much for the family's sake as his own. The trip they take together proves fundamental to García Márquez's development as a writer. "Now," he writes, "with more than seventy-five years behind me, I know it was the most important of all the decisions I had to make in my career as a writer." Returning to Aracataca, he witnesses the town's dire poverty, listens to the voice of its defeated nostalgia. This journey by boat and rail is also essential to the digressive structure of the book; in this regard, Living to Tell the Tale resembles García Márquez's earlier work of novelistic history, The General in His Labyrinth (1990), which recounts...