Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. He was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He is the author of many
works of fiction and nonfiction, including
One Hundred
Years of Solitude,
Love In The Time
Cholera,
The Autumn Of The Patriarch,
The General In His Labyrinth, and
News Of
A Kidnapping. He lives in Mexico City.
1. The book's multilayered title-Living to Tell the
Tale-is given greater significance because García Márquez
has been fighting lymphatic cancer since 1999. He has called this
misfortune "an enormous stroke of luck" since it gave him the
impetus to write his memoirs. The Spanish title-Vivir para
contarla-means "to live to tell it." What other shades of
meaning might the title suggest?
2. The memoir begins, "My mother asked me to go with her to sell
the house" [p. 3], and then weaves a story of how and why that day
was unforgettable: "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" [p. 5]. The sentence is reminiscent of many moments in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, when an event is
identified as setting in motion the story and the meanings that
flow from it. If García Márquez is deliberately tying a moment in
his own life to certain moments in his fiction, where a decisive,
unforgettable experience is illuminated and obsessively returned
to, what is he suggesting about the nature of his own story?
3. What is the tone in which García Márquez recounts his life?
How intimate is his relationship with the reader? What is his own
attitude toward his younger self?
4. 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?
5. The epigraph states, "Life is not what one lived, but what
one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." In
Living to Tell the Tale, how does memory shape
meaning and identity?
6. The child Gabriel has memories that could not have taken
place, which gives him "a bad name in the house for having
intrauterine memories and premonitory dreams" [p. 70]. What is the
role of prophecies, dreams, and irrational fears in the story of
García Márquez's life?
7. García Márquez writes, "I needed this old age without remorse
to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house
in Cataca was that they were always mired in their nostalgic
memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them the deeper
they sank" [p. 70]. He suggests that nostalgia does not play a
significant role in his own life. How important is the concept of
nostalgia to his fiction? What is the difference between nostalgia
and the creative mining of memory?
8. Unforgettable and fantastic incidents of life in
Aracataca-the exorcism of his Aunt Wenefrida [p. 82], the violence
of the "Black Night of Aracataca" [p. 46], the massacre of the
banana workers [pp. 62-63]-are narrated in the second chapter.
These events, and many others, became a part of García Márquez's
personal mythology and made their way into his fiction. But, as he
says of the "Black Night of Aracataca," "there is no certain
evidence it ever really happened" [p. 46]. How does the memoir
address this question of the way the imagination contributes to
individual and collective history?
9. García Márquez writes, "I believe that the essence of my
nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the
family and to the many in our service who ministered to my
childhood" [pp. 74-75]. Why were women so important to him? How are
the women different, in roles or in attitudes, from the men in
García Márquez's life? How does he portray his relationship with
his mother?
10. García Márquez says of his father, "Papá was a difficult man
to see into or to please. He was always very much poorer than he
seemed and considered poverty a hateful enemy he could never accept
and never defeat" [p. 56]. How does the memoir portray García
Márquez's relationship with his father, and what situations were
crucial in determining his feelings about his father?
11. In light of the rootlessness of contemporary American
middle-class life and the loosening of bonds among members of
extended families, discuss García Márquez's immersion in community,
family, and friendships. Do you see his extraordinary connectedness
as determined by his own temperament, by Latin American culture, or
both?
12. Critic Michael Wood has noted that the book suggests "again
and again, that the world this writer grew up in was effectively a
García Márquez novel before he even touched it" [London Review
of Books, 3 June 2004, p. 3]. García Márquez himself comments
on this phenomenon when he writes, "It was not one of those
[stories] that are invented on paper. Life invents them" [p. 528].
Is it true that the sense of fecundity, the density of inspiration,
and the frequent occurrence of improbable happenings provided
García Márquez with exactly what he needed for his art? Discuss a
few events in his novels that you now know have their origins in
the author's life.
13. The memoir conveys the boy's immense love of books and his
hunger for learning. He could memorize long passages of poetry and
countless songs, and his teachers were very much aware of his
gifts. How important to his formation as an artist were the various
schools he attended? Does the memoir suggest that his education
served and shaped his vocation or that García Márquez would have
become the writer he is regardless of his schooling?
14. "The truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached
me like a remote echo and moved me only when it spilled over into
rivers of blood" [p. 401]. What does the memoir convey about
Colombia's troubled political history? How critical to García
Márquez's formation as an adult was the assassination of Jorge
Eliécer Gaitán and the violence that followed [pp. 312-13]? How is
the experience of political upheaval here reflected in the
historical or political consciousness of his fiction?
15. "I would light a cigarette without finishing the one before,
I would breathe in the smoke with the longing for life seen in
asthmatics gulping down air, and the three packs I consumed each
day were evident on my nails and in an old dog's cough that
disrupted my youth. In short, I was shy and sad, like a good
Caribbean, and so jealous of my intimate life that I would answer
any question about it with a rhetorical digression. I was convinced
my bad luck was congenital and irremediable, above all with women
and with money, but I did not care, because I believed I did not
need good luck in order to write well. I did not care about glory,
or money, or old age, because I was sure I was going to die very
young, and in the street" [p. 401]. Consider the various elements
of this quotation in which García Márquez describes the young man
he was on the day his mother came to ask him to help sell the
house. How did his journey up the Magdalena River that day change
him?
16. How important was journalism to García Márquez's formation
as a writer, and how does it relate to his fiction? If you have
read The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor,
News of a Kidnapping, or Chronicle of a
Death Foretold, how is his style of narration in these
books influenced by the journalist's craft? He writes, "The novel
and journalism are children of the same mother" [p. 290]. What does
he mean by this?
17. García Márquez writes of his maternal grandparents' house,
where he spent the first eight years of his life, "I cannot imagine
a family environment more favorable to my vocation than that
lunatic house" [p. 90]. Which aspects of this household, and which
people in it, have the strongest impact on the creative life of the
child?
18. The structure of the memoir and the movement of time within
it are unique. Is the story given in a strictly chronological
order? What is the effect of the use of time?
19. In his Nobel Prize lecture entitled "The Solitude of Latin
America," García Márquez wrote, "Poets and beggars, musicians and
prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled
reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our
crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our
lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude."
The memoir is one of the "conventional means" by which writers
render reality believable; what role does this memoir play in
rendering Latin American-particularly Colombian-life believable and
thus in lessening its isolation from the rest of the world?
20. Regarding the countless interviews he has given throughout
his career, García Márquez says, "An immense majority of the ones I
have not been able to avoid on any subject ought to be considered
as an important part of my works of fiction, because they are no
more than that: fantasies about my life" [p. 489]. In a memoir, as
opposed to an interview, an author controls the way he is viewed by
the public. What truth about himself and his life does García
Márquez seem to want to convey?