Living to Tell the Tale

Product Information

Yet its sum is not a Bildungsroman of the author, whose personality is rarely front-lit, but the re-creation of an astonishing universe, the Caribbean coastlands of Colombia in the first half of the last century. Anyone who might think that a factual counterpart of García Márquez's fictions could be at best only a pallid duplicate can be reassured. Scene after remarkable scene, character after arresting character, cascades of gestures without measure and coincidences beyond reason make Living to Tell the Tale a cousin of the great novels." - Perry Anderson, The Nation As the passengers grew more fearful, Hung’s mother called for him and 15-year-old Huy to sit with her. “She called all the kids over so she could see us. We didn’t really understand, but now we know,” said Huy.

A little dignity," she said. But she softened this at once by saying in a different tone: "I'm telling you this because of how much we love you." He was able to attend very good schools, and though this necessitated a separation from his family he was fortunate in finding understanding pretty much wherever he went. Where it had muddled along all his life, it was with this one fell swoop thrust into the 20th century. This memoir may not win over those who have resisted being persuaded that Mr García Márquez is a great, rather than a very good, writer. His style is one of much poetry but sometimes less meaning than meets the eye (.....) But most readers will not mind. They will simply enjoy the anecdotes and the prose of a master of the narrative art and of the Spanish language." - The Economist The book was originally published in Spanish in 2002, with an English translation by Edith Grossman published in 2003.

live to tell the ˈtale

Don't doubt it for a second, Colonel. What they wanted to do with you was throw you into the water."

Others among the Wellpark refugees said they regularly found themselves in fights with racists at school or on the streets of the council estates where they lived. Some of the adults struggled with a new language and found only irregular work far below the professional positions they had once held. But, in time, their children thrived. García Márquez, whose splendid memoir of his first three decades, Living to Tell the Tale, is a swoon of swans" - John Leonard, Harper's Garcia Marquez relates the events impressively, realizing then also that on that day Columbia itself was changed, marked forever. The story opens with a family crisis. At twenty-three, Gabriel has left the university and has no intention of returning. “My father . . . would have forgiven me anything except my not hanging on the wall the academic degree he could not have” [p. 9]. At one point his father tells him, “You hold the fate of the family in your hands” [p. 425]. How is this difficulty negotiated, and what does it tell us about the rights and responsibilities of family members in Caribbean culture? Is García Márquez’s early life determined by the wishes of his parents and the economic needs of his family or by his own desires?Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-11-18 16:33:22 Bookplateleaf 0008 Boxid IA135218 Boxid_2 CH110001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Curatenote shipped Donor A decade after he moved to California his parents followed and opened a launderette. About a dozen of the Wellpark families settled in the US. The bulk remained in Britain, including Huy. He took a degree in civil engineering after calling the University of Manchester and asking to be put through to the engineering department. Neither my mother nor I, of course, could even have imagined that this simple two-day trip would be so decisive that the longest and most diligent of lives would not be enough for me to finish recounting it. Now, with more than seventy-five years behind me, I know it was the most important of all the decisions I had to make in my career as a writer. That is to say: in my entire life. He found literary-minded friends all along the way too (Álvaro Mutis, in particular, came to be a close friend), and he also found a great deal of encouragement. The British Council for Refugees gave Hung a scholarship to study English in Saffron Walden. In the holidays he went on a trip with his mother to visit relatives in America. They encouraged him to apply for medical school there and he was accepted. “So I stayed,” he said. “I became a foreign student from England,” he added, laughing at the thought. After his medical degree, he studied for an MBA and in time did well out of the considerable overlap between medicine and business in the US.