Better Than Book Reports: More Than 40 Creative Responses to Literature Book

"A good writer will go on writing even though his shoes need mending and his books don't sell" - an inspiring quote to sustain one through this huge book that traces Gabriel Garcia Marquez's life from childhood to his sunset years. I thought it could have been subtitled "How to win the Nobel Prize when you come from the sticks."

Garcia Marquez (Gabo) lived in interesting times: through the rise and fall of Communism, through the rise and fall of the Violencia in his country, through the rise and fall of the drug cartels that don't quite fall but seem to re-incarnate elsewhere in Latin America. He emerged during the Latin American Boom in literature along with Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortaza and others, and rode that wave. His native Colombia was ruled by oligopolies that either supported the Conservatives or the Liberals, the only two political parties with clout in the country while the rest of Latin America was going socialist or communist. There was a geographic and cultural separation between the elites who lived in Colombia's Andean capital, Bogota, and those who lived in the hot Caribbean Costa, Gabo's playing ground, and he flipped back and forth between these two extremes many times.

His childhood and youth is the most interesting part of the book, for it illuminates what created this writer. He was the neglected oldest child, of a family of 11 children (15, if you count the illegitimate ones) raised by grandparents, in a place where families often had breeds of legitimate and illegitimate children living under the same roof. His father was a compulsive rake who was always struggling to get by and who re-invented himself in many jobs, finally using the title of "Dr." Although his father wanted him to become a lawyer, Gabo was drawn to writing from a young age. He went through the typical writer's grounding: a brutally rejected first novel; a journalistic career which initially paid a pittance before vaulting him into launching his own literary and political journals; living in different Latin countries from Spain, France, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and in both regions of Colombia. When the novel that he risked everything for (food, shelter, belongings, even family), One Hundred Years of Solitude, hit the jackpot, his life changed from starving writer to literary star. The biography also takes a different trajectory from this point and focuses on Gabo's growing influence, helped by his literary success, as a political middleman, often seen at the side of kings and presidents around the world. A traditionally shy man, he used his fame for effect, both to elevate his status as a writer and to further the causes he believed in. He particularly fought on the side of leftist dictators like Castro and was opposed to right-wing types like Pinochet. There is no doubt that his political connections earned him the Nobel, but then we have always questioned the symbolism that the Nobel represents: is it recognition in a field of endeavour, or is it a political statement pinned to a recipient who can give that message maximum mileage?

The book therefore teaches us two things: the evolution of Latin America from the 1920s to the turn of the 21st century, and the evolution of Gabo as a writer during that same period. Author Gerald Martin is careful to keep the focus mainly on Garcia Marquez the writer rather than on Garcia Marquez the politician, although one persona feeds the other and vice versa. As a writer we see Gabo's focus being to draw material for his fiction from his life experiences, although his delivery is termed magic realism. Thus Macondo is his home town of Aracataca, the Patriarch is a fusion of Fidel Castro and himself, the Colonel is Gabo's grandfather, the lovers in Love in the Time of Cholera are his parents, and so on. He also has a flirtation with cinema by writing and producing many forgettable movies that earn him a decent living but convinces him that script writing is a shallow art form over which he has no control. Thus after this foray, and many others that include politics and political journalism, he always returns to his literary writing where he is happiest.
Many people die in this book, of natural causes and by assassination. Gabo's own writings -"Freedom of the press is only freedom of the bourgeoisie"- against capitalism, American imperialism, and Colombian cartels, and his passionate defence of friend Fidel Castro make him a target, and when he returns to live in Colombia he is provided with a government bodyguard that rotates roughly 60 personnel during his sojourn there. He is even floored by a punch from former friend Mario Vargas Llosa in a public place. For a man who wrote continuously about death, who walked in its shadow during the times of the Violencia and PabloEscobar, and who beat cancer twice, Garcia Marquez always lived in the fear of death.

His post-Nobel life, after the whirlwind of adulation and homage, continues with winning books like Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Life in the Time of Cholera, but literary greats are also fallible, and he succumbs to the family curse: the onset of dementia. The edge goes out in subsequent work, and in his last, Memories of my Melancholy Whores, it starts to become visible - a pity because Melancholy Whores is his most personal, the story of a 90-year old man trying to regain the innocence of youth that was robbed off him by an older woman at the time; his answer: consort with a teenage girl. It was as if the aging Gabo was trying to recapture his innocence which was lost when his wily father had initiated him to sex in a whorehouse at the hands of an older prostitute.

The last chapter, in which Gabo reaches for immortality, is a bit much, and reads like his own magic realism. On the one hand it is a tribute to the literary hero who has bought the rich and powerful in the world to heel, on the other it sounds like sycophantic worship of a man elevated to Godhood, a fallible man who simply loved to write stories and hobnob with politicians to further his career.

A great book for aspiring writers to understand where the consummate artist can sometimes end up. It may not happen again in our lifetime, but it is refreshing to know that it did happen, and perhaps, with the right conditions and circumstances, could happen again.