Military Books - Military Times

New biography gets to the heart of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gerald Martin’s biography of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, is so terrific, it makes a reviewer want to lurk around bookstores, urging readers to buy it. Really.

One reason is Martin’s rich material. Garcia Marquez has led an extraordinary life, not just as a writer but as a journalist and a public figure in the turbulent world of Latin American politics. Like soccer star Pele or Madonna, he’s known by “Gabo.”

Because of novels such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the 82-year-old master of “magical realism” is admired by critics and read by millions — a rare achievement in the literary world. Like William Faulkner with his Yoknapatawpha County, Garcia Marquez has hewn an imaginary geography — “Macondo” — from the tropical Colombian backwater he knew as a child growing up in his beloved grandfather’s big house.

His books have made him famous, but his friendships and leftist political beliefs have made Garcia Marquez controversial. For three decades, he has been a close friend and public defender of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Martin, a British expert in Latin American literature who is fluent in Spanish, spent 17 years writing and researching this biography. Garcia Marquez calls Martin his “tolerated” biographer and sat for interviews.

Martin also spoke with Garcia Marquez’s wife, Mercedes, whom the author married in 1958. He interviewed their two sons, one of whom, Rodrigo Garcia, is a Hollywood writer and director.

Yet, remarkably, Martin has not allowed his research to swamp the biography. In a crisp, clear, compelling narrative, we learn of Garcia Marquez’s journey to manhood put in the context of Colombian culture and its often violent history. Martin traces Garcia Marquez’s decades as a journalist in Latin America and Europe. He also explores the roots of magical realism and details what winning the Nobel Prize in literature meant not just for Garcia Marquez but for Latin Americans.

Martin admires Garcia Marquez the writer but doesn’t worship the man who comes across charming but more shrewd than his man-of-the-people public persona suggests.

Without being invasive, Martin’s biography reveals the private Garcia Marquez, as a man and as a writer. The result is a biography that is fresh and insightful about one of the most popular and influential writers of the 20th century.