In the cradle of magical realism
ARACATACA, Colombia — Many years later, when he sat down to face his computer screen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez would write about that distant afternoon when his mother insisted that he accompany her to sell his childhood home here.
At that time, in 1950, Aracataca was a forgotten village, built along the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs--or so Garcia Marquez recalled.
"Now, with more than 75 years measured out, I know it was the most important decision of many in my career as a writer," he writes in his just released autobiography. "That is to say, the most important decision in my life."
Garcia Marquez, now the Nobel Prize-winning eminence grise of Latin American literature, has just published the first of what he hopes will be a three-volume autobiography titled "Vivir Para Contarla" or "Living to Tell It." Now available only in Spanish, Random House has the rights to publish an English translation in the future. The work is a dreamy account reaching from childhood to the publication of his first novel, "Leaf Storm," published in 1955.
More than anything, the book is a portrait of a man coming to terms with his artistry, a self-examination by the former journalist of the who, what, where, when, why and how of his life. But it is also a love letter to his past, a fond recollection of the place where he first gathered the material for his most famous novels, sweeping and startlingly original works such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" that have ever since defined Latin America literature.
"He has said that he owes everything to the fact of having been born in [Aracataca] and having been raised until 10 or 11 in the home of his grandparents," said Dasso Saldivar, Garcia Marquez's earlier biographer. "With complete certainty, I can say that if he had been born and raised in another place, he would not be the great writer he is today."
It is the influence of this quirky little village on the man, and in turn, his influence on the town, that is one of the primary building blocks of his work.
Garcia Marquez's grandparents helped found Aracataca, a tiny town wedged between the snow-capped Sierra de Santa Marta mountain range and a vast marsh known simply as "The Great Swamp." They arrived after his grandfather killed another man in a duel over family honor, a story that found its way into "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
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