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Vivir para Contarla

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Este primer volumen de las memorias de García Márquez me la enviaron desde Colombia como un regalo.
Para los amantes de Gabo, como yo, el libro es de una dimensión extraordinaria!
En un cambio total de género, ésta autobiografía demuestra que GGM es uno de los mejores escritores de nuestro tiempo. Gabo convierte su vida real y la de su familia en un relato inolvidable. Se develan los misterios de los personajes de sus obras, se es testigo de su vida como escritor, de su vida como ser humano. Se es testigo de la historia de Colombia.
Lo leí muy despacio para que no se me acabaran tan rápido sus 579 páginas. Cuando por fin lo terminé de leer sentí el desasosiego de querer más. Sólo espero que no se tarde mucho el segundo tomo

Definitivamente es uno de los mejores libros que he leído, es fascinante como Gabriel García Márquez describe su vida, principalmente su juventud y sus inicios como periodista y escritor...

Siendo una ávida lectora de este autor, no podía más que maravillarme por cada uno de los aspectos de su vida. Como viniendo de una familia pobre logra sus sueños de ser escritor a pesar de la oposición inicial de sus padres. Este primer libro sólo llega hasta el lanzamiento de "La hojarasca" y hasta su primer viaje fuera de Colombia (Europa)...

Al acercarme cada vez más al final, más trataba de demorarlo, fue MARAVILLOSO leer este libro!!!, GGM nos deja preparados para el próximo libro, lamentablemente debemos esperar, pero la espera será gratificada cuando lo tengamos en nuestras manos.
Uno de los aspectos más relevantes es la forma en que fue escrito, es decir, como García Márquez entrelaza su realidad con la realidad del país y como en algún momento me pareció estar leyendo una solo historia, no la de un hombre y su país.

Creo que lo mejor antes de leer "Vivir para contarla" es haber leído algunas de sus obras, para mí particularmente fue así, ver referencias de libros que ya he tenido la fortuna de leer fue muy edificante, me ayudó a entender mucho más a este premio novel (1982), a conocer las historias que dieron origen a muchos de sus libros, como "La hojarasca", "Cien años de soledad", "Crónica de una muerte anunciada", "Relato de un náufrago", "Del Amor y Otros Demonios" entre otros, a saber como surge el famoso pueblo ficticio "Macondo", así como a entender un sinnúmero de personajes que a lo largo de su carrera ha utilizado en sus libros y que de alguna manera lo tocaron en su propia vida.

Gabriel García Márquez ha demostrado nueva vez que es un genio de la literatura latinoamericana, su forma de escribir nunca acabará de sorprenderme y de cautivarme. Definitivamente todas aquellas personas interesadas en conocer más a "Gabito" deberían comprar y guardar en su colección de libros más preciados "Vivir para Contarla".

This is much more than an autobiography, it is a piece of art by itself. Gabo takes us around his extended family in northern Colombia in an encyclopedic journey throughout life, love, history and the magical world he depicted in his previous work. Those who have read his novels will find the inspiration for some of his characters and stories. There is no question about it: he enjoys to "novelar" as he describes the way to write novels. His foreword tells you all: Life is not what you have lived, but the what you remember, and how you remember it to tell it (my translation)

This is an extremely fun book to read. No big dramas, not complicated plots, just Gabriel García Márquez life history. But you're going to find yourself reading it in the most unexpected places, 'cause you won't be able to stop or let it go! It is writen in his classic style, jumping from the past to the further past to the recent past in a single page. But what is really fascinating of this book is that almost every single character of his past novels appears here, but in flesh & blood. You will find out why "Love In The Time Of Cholera" was written for (and who's story it is), what the name "Macondo" stands for, and why "Nigromanta" was such a fascinating and important character on "One Hundred Years of Solitude".
If you are craving for the new Nobel Prize winning novel, maybe you're looking at the wrong place, but if you like García Márquez "lighter" books and enjoy a very well written book, and a writer that has the ability to convert a simple disfunctional ordinary family history into one of the best books ever, then you will certainly enjoy "Vivir Para Contarla".

El primer libro de la narrativa en español que leí por el placer mismo de hacerlo fue Cien Años de Soledad de Gabriel García Márquez, pues su lectura no era mandatoria en Puerto Rico hace treinta años, cuando yo era estudiante de secundaria. A este genio universal de las letras y a su obra, le debo el amor por los libros que nació entonces en mí y que con un subir y bajar en intensidad se ha negado a abandonarme a pesar del tiempo transcurrido. Leer Vivir Para Contarla fue como un soplo de oxígeno sobre un fuego que logró revivir ese amor que recién andaba cuesta abajo. El estímulo que Gabo me dió al finalizar la lectura de sus memorias fue suficiente para que en pocas semanas redescubriera, degustara y me enamorarme de nuevo de la media docena de novelas en español que desde entonces he disfrutado, más de las que he leído en años recientes.

Ambos escribieron en momentos difíciles de la sociedad en que vivieron. El siglo de Cervantes, el siglo de oro de las letras españolas, fue al mismo tiempo el momento de la decandencia del poder español.
La época de García Márquez ha sido de las más difíciles de América Latina.
Sin embargo, las gentes de esas sociedades vivieron las vidas más humanas de su época, desde lo más bajo hasta lo más sublime. Cervantes y García Márquez vivieron para contárnoslo.
¡Cómo brilla el español en la pluma de estos dos! ¡Qué placer poder dominar el español y leer sus obras!

"Living to Tell the Tale," ("Vivir Para Contarla"), is the first book in a planned trilogy that will make up the memoirs of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the renown Colombian writer who initially won public acclaim in the mid-1960s for his novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude." At that time, Garcia Marquez, a journalist and writer, had never sold more than 700 copies of a book. While driving his family through Mexico, he had a veritable brainstorm. He remembered his grandmother's storytelling technique - to recall fantastic, improbable events as if they had actually happened - literally. That was the key to recounting the life of the imaginary village of Macondo and her inhabitants. He turned the car around and drove back home to begin "One Hundred Years of Solitude" anew. To my mind it is one of the 20th century's best works of fiction, and was highlighted in the citation awarding Garcia Marquez the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

"Living to Tell The Tale" relates the early years of the author's life, although some of the book's most important incidents predate Garcia Marquez's birth. The impact of these experiences, the people and their stories, were to have a powerful effect on him, as a man and as a writer. This is the tale of his parents' courtship, marriage and the birth of their children, Garcia Marquez, (Gabito), the oldest, and his ten siblings. It tells of his early years which were spent in Aracataca, in the home of his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, was a Liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days. He was supposedly a storyteller of great repute. The Colonel told his young grandson that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man. Later García Márquez would put these words into the mouths of his characters. His grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, had a major influence on Gabriel's life also. Another great source of stories, her mind was filled with superstitions and folklore, and she gossiped away with her numerous sisters within hearing range of young "Gabito." No matter how fantastic her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the absolute, verifiable truth. This was the style which was to effect Garcia Marquez's fiction, sometimes called "magical realism." These women filled the house with stories of ghosts, premonitions and omens - all of which were studiously ignored by her husband. He had little interest in "women's beliefs."

Aracataca was a small village, a banana town on the Caribbean coast, where poverty was the norm and violence was an everyday occurrence. On December 6, 1928, in the Cienaga train station, near Aracataca, 3,000 striking banana workers were shot and killed by troops from Antioquia. Although still a baby, this event, recounted to him, was to have a profound effect on the author. The incident was officially forgotten and omitted from Colombian history textbooks.

In 1940, when he was twelve, Gabo was awarded a scholarship to a secondary school for gifted students, run by Jesuits. The school, the Liceo Nacional, was in Zipaquirá, a city 30 miles to the north of Bogotá. It was during his school years, 1940s and 50s, that he was first drawn to poetry - a national obsession in Colombia. Verse was revered as an art form, and also as an effective means of social and political commentary. He and his friends, fellow students, would read aloud and discuss poetry late into the night. The youths admired a group of poets called the piedra y cielo ("stone and sky") and they were strongly influenced by Juan Ramon Jimenez and Pablo Neruda. Too poor to buy his own books, Gabo would devour novels borrowed from friends.

While still a boy, he decided he wanted to be a writer. The people who surrounded him in his childhood later became instrumental when developing the characters and the storylines for his novels. "Love In The Time of Cholera" was inspired by the romance between his mother and father. And his grandfather, who had twelve children, (some say 16), by two different women, became Colonel Aureliano Buendia in "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

One of the most powerful episodes of the book tells of the period called "La Violencia." In 1948 the Liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, was assassinated. The murder led to rioting, and left approximately 2500 dead on the streets of Bogota, during "el Bogotázo." Political violence and repression followed. One of the buildings that burned was the pension where Garcia Marquez lived, and his manuscripts were destroyed along with his living quarters. The National University was closed and he was forced to go to the university in Cartagena. Garcia Marquez began his career as a journalist, writing stories and commentary for a Liberal newspaper in Cartegana. Later he moved to the coastal city of Barranquilla where he began to associate with a group of young writers who admired modernists like Joyce, Woolf and Hemingway, and introduced Marquez to Faulkner. In 1954 he returned to Bogota, as a reporter for El Espectador.

Garcia Marquez begins his book, however, not with his real birth in 1928, but with his "birth as a writer," at age 22. He and his mother took a trip from Baranquilla, where he was working as a reporter, to his childhood home in Aracataca, now virtually a ghost town. They were going to sell the ancestral house. Vivid memories were stirred up here, memories which electrified his imagination. This trip was to change the course of his writing life. "With the first step I took onto the burning sands of the town, Aracataca instantly became Macondo, an earthly paradise of desolation and nostalgia." His one great subject became his family, "which was never the protagonist of anything, but only a witness to and victim of everything." His is not a chronological autobiography. Garcia Marquez cuts back and forth through time to show how memory colors experience. As he says 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."

Humor, dry wit, a sense of the absurd, is a trademark throughout the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this autobiography is full of his deadpan humor. His anecdotes of his many mistresses and cafe society are wonderful. "Living To Tell The Tale" is not a conventional literary memoir. It is a magical combination of memoir and national history written in the author's remarkable voice. It is his personal mythology, from the repertoire which birthed Macondo. The narrative is intimate and sincere, filled with bewitching details and descriptions. In spite of poverty, and the political turmoil so prevalent in Colombia during his lifetime, Gabo acknowledges his early years were filled with joy, a sense of well-being and encouragement from many people. Garcia Marquez leaves us, at the end of this volume, with a glimpse of his future love, his wife, ""wearing a green dress with golden lace in that year's style, her hair cut like swallows' wings, and with the intense stillness of someone waiting for a person who will not arrive."

Bravo Gabriel Garcia Marquez!!
JANA

This book is merely the first volume in the author's three-part autobiography, and covers only the period that goes from his birth in 1927 to 1955, when he was already a more or less well-known writer in Colombia... All the same, it is an essential way to start if we want to know more about him, as a writer but also as a person.

If you buy "Vivir para contarla", you can expect a wonderful prose, interesting and somewhat strange metaphors, and the kind of description that manages to capture a moment in such a way that the reader feels that he was there too. An excellent example of that is what García Marquez writes about the moment when he arrives at Cartagena after leaving Bogotá in the aftermath of the great 1948 riot: "A principios de la semana había dejado a Bogotá chapaleando en un pantano de sangre y lodo, todavía con promotorios de cadáveres sin dueños abandonados entre escombros humeantes. De pronto, el mundo se había vuelto otro en Cartagena. No había rastros de la guerra que asolaba el país y me costaba trabajo creer que aquella soledad sin dolor, aquel mar incesante, aquella inmensa sensación de haber llegado me estaban sucediendo apenas una semana después en una misma vida". Incredible, isn't it?.

The author shares information about his eccentric extended family, and stories where myth and reality seem so mixed that they are impossible to differentiate. García Marquez also tells details of his school years, when he learnt from books but also from people: "No sé que aprendí en realidad durante el cautiverio del Liceo Nacional, pero los cuatro años de convivencia bien avenida con todos me infundieron una visión unitaria de la nación, descubrí cuán diversos éramos y para qué servíamos, y aprendí para no olvidarlo nunca que en la suma de cada uno de nosotros estaba todo el país". It is rather funny to read how much he disliked to study, and the way he avoided questions by talking of his great passion: literature. Afterwards he would try to study law, but his heart wasn't on that, so he abandoned his studies after a while to dedicate all his energies to writing...

The reader will be treated to a great description of his innumerable friends, and will feel he also was part of their daily discussions about literature, and Colombia. The curious reader will learn about García Marquez's favorite books, ideas, and reasons for writing. He says that "Cada cosa, con sólo mirarla, me suscitaba una ansiedad irresistible de escribir para no morir", and remembers what Rilke wrote: "Si usted cree que es capaz de vivir sin escribir, no escriba".

On the whole, I highly recommend this book. Reading it is remembering that the power of words is so great that it can make us visit places we haven't gone to, and live lives different to our own...

Belen Alcat

Todos los que somos apasionados de la pluma de Gabriel Garcia Marquez, disfrutamos cuando el autor describe anecdotas tan interesantes de su vida que nosotros conociamos por la lectura de sus obras.-
Vivir para contarla! es un libro apasionante que nos hace comprender la grandeza de la imaginacion de GABO, cada uno de los hechos que el narra simplemente nos transporta a la trama de sus obras.-
Excelente lectura, obligatoria para entender la obra completa de Garcia marquez.-

Lo que hace este libro ser tan especial es la manera tan viva que el auto hace revivir sus acontecimientos y/o experiencias. El lector de una manera hace parte de la historia, y se siente atrapado por el contexto. Es una obra magnifica por uno de los mejores escritores hispanos.