‘The first thing Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha …’
Their distant, nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign land, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world …
Márquez’s strange pilgrims – the ageing prostitute preparing for death by teaching her dog to weep at her grave, the panicked husband scared for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a long-haul flight from Paris – experience with all his humour, warmth and colour, what it is to be a Latin American adrift in Europe or, indeed, any outsider living far from home.
‘Celebratory and full of strange relish at life’s oddness. The stories draw their strength from Márquez’s generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent’ William Boyd
‘The most important writer of fiction in any language’ Bill Clinton
‘Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself’ New Statesman
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GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
‘It asks to be read more than twice, and the rewards are dazzling’ Observer
‘Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside …’
As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man laying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their egocentric, maniacally violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea, can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal?
Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lies have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Márquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality.
‘Delights with its quirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its total originality’ Vogue
‘Captures perfectly the moral squalor and political paralysis that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long-term dictator’ Guardian
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
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GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
‘The vigour and coherence of Márquez’s vision, the brilliance and beauty of his imagery, the narrative tension … coursing through his pages … makes it difficult to put down’ Daily Telegraph
At the age of forty-six General Simón Bolívar, who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. Consumed by the memories of what he has done and what he failed to do, Bolívar hopes to see a way out of the labyrinth in which he has lived all his life …
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GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
‘A gripping tale of survival’ The Times
‘On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Colombia …’
In 1955, eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Márquez retells the survivor’s amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was Márquez’s first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.
‘The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic’ Independent
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THE BEGINNING
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First published in Spain as Vivir para contarla by Mondadori (Grijalbo Mondadori, S.A.), Barcelona 2002
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 2003
First published in Penguin Books 2004
This edition published 2014
Copyright © Gabriel García Márquez, 2003
Cover © David Alan Harvey / Magnum Photos
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Portions appeared in the New Yorker, February 19, 2002, and in Zoetrope vol. 2, no. 3, Fall 1998
ISBN: 978-0-141-91736-8
*The manolo was to Madrid what the cockney was to London.
*A prayer, unauthorized by the Church, used by campesinos.
*A Mambí (plural Mambises) was a Cuban rebel against Spanish rule of the island.
*The wordplay is based on escarabajo [beetle], abajo [below], and arriba [above]. Escararriba is an invented word.
*The ingenuity of the phrase (Las populares canciones de Agustín Lara no son canciones populares) is based on the position of the adjective, which gives rise to the two meanings of popular: widespread and well liked, and of the people, or folk (as opposed to learned or courtly).
*An allusion to the traditional saying that every child is born with a loaf of bread—that is, each child is provided for.
*The grammatical person and verb form used to express the equivalent of plural “you” differ in Spain and Latin America. The passage translates: “The way you are living now, you not only are in an uncertain situation but are also setting a bad example for the town.”
*An institution in the Hispanic world, a tertulia is a regular informal gathering for conversation; it can take place in a café or in someone’s home.
*Nueva Granada, or New Granada, was the name of Colombia when it was a Spanish colony.
*The English equivalent is the -ly adverbial ending.
*“Let’s get them!”
*The rhymes in English, of course, do not correspond to the ones in Spanish, but they are essentially nonsense verses: Los piononos para los monos, los diabolines para los mamines, las de coco para los locos, las de panela para Manuela.
*In addition to “one-eyed,” the word tuerto also means “twisted,” “c
rooked,” or “bent.”
*In Spanish, many verbs in the imperfect tense have endings based on -ía, which would create a rhyme with the name Buendía.
*The content of the phrases in English is different from Spanish in order to preserve the repetition of sounds typical of these exercises. The Spanish reads: … la mula que va al molino y el chocolate del chico de la cachucha chica y el adivino que se dedica a la bebida.
*A literary genre that focuses on typical or picturesque regional customs.
*A rasping percussion instrument, also known as a güiro, usually made of wood or a gourd, and sometimes metal, which is played by rubbing a stick up and down along the ridges cut into the instrument.
*This comment is based on a well-known admonition to Latin American poets, early in the twentieth century, to abandon the symbolist and Parnassian school of Modernism for a more local and relevant style of writing.
*Cantor is the equivalent of “singer” or “songbird.”
*Identification for those under eighteen.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 56
