Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A Life

Zusatztext 44610862 Informationen zum Autor Gerald Martin is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Professor in Caribbean Studies at London Metropolitan University. For twenty-five years he was the only English-speaking member of the “Archives” Association of Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature in Paris, and he is a recent president of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature in the United States. Among his publications are Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century , a translation and critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Men of Maize , and several contributions to the Cambridge History of Latin America. He lives in England. Klappentext In this exhaustive and enlightening biography-nearly two decades in the making-Gerald Martin dexterously traces the life and times of one of the twentieth century's greatest literary titans, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez. Martin chronicles the particulars of an extraordinary life, from his upbringing in backwater Colombia and early journalism career, to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude at age forty, and the wealth and fame that followed. Based on interviews with more than three hundred of Garcia Marquez's closest friends, family members, fellow authors, and detractors-as well as the many hours Martin spent with 'Gabo' himself-the result is a revelation of both the writer and the man. It is as gripping as any of Gabriel García Márquez's powerful journalism, as enthralling as any of his acclaimed and beloved fiction. 1 Of Colonels and Lost Causes 1899-1927 Five hundred years after Europeans stumbled across it, Latin America often seems a disappointment to its inhabitants. It is as if its destiny had been fixed by Columbus, “the great captain,” who discovered the new continent by mistake, misnamed it—“the Indies”—and then died embittered and disillusioned in the early sixteenth century; or by the “great liberator” Simón Bolívar, who put an end to Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century but died dismayed at the newly emancipated region’s disunity and at the bitter thought that “he who makes a revolution ploughs the sea.” More recently the fate of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the twentieth century’s most romantic revolutionary icon, who died a martyr’s death in Bolivia in 1967, only confirmed the idea that Latin America, still the unknown continent, still the land of the future, is home to grandiose dreams and calamitous failures. Long before the name of Guevara circled the planet, in a small Colombian town which history only briefly illuminated during the years when the Boston-based United Fruit Company chose to plant bananas there in the early twentieth century, a small boy would listen while his grandfather told tales of a war that lasted a thousand days, at the end of which he too had experienced the bitter solitude of the vanquished, tales of glorious deeds in days gone by, of ghostly heroes and villains, stories which taught the child that justice is not naturally built in to the fabric of life, that right does not always triumph in the kingdom of this world, and that ideals which fill the hearts and minds of many men and women may be defeated and even disappear from the face of the earth. Unless they endure in the memory of those who survive and live to tell the tale. At the end of the nineteenth century, seventy years after achieving independence from Spain, the republic of Colombia had been a country of less than five million controlled by an elite of perhaps three thousand owners of large haciendas, most of whom were politicians and businessmen, and many also lawyers, writers or grammarians—which is why the capital, Bogotá, became known as the “Athens of South America.” The War of a Thousand Days was the last and m...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Gerald Martin
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 31.08.2010
• EAN: 9780307472861
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47286-1
• Pagine: 688
• Dimensioni: 134 mm x 205 mm x 38 mm
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi > Epistole, diari; Saggistica > Filosofia, religione > Biografie, autobiografie