Books News
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin
By Jessica Schneider Jun 16, 2009, 10:16 GMT
The first full and authorized biography of the 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—the most popular international novelist of the last fifty years.Over the course of the nearly two decades Gerald Martin gave to the research and writing of this masterly biography, he not only spent many hours in conversation with Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez himself but also interviewed more than three hundred others, including GarcÃa Márquez’s wife and ...more
This is the latest title to the biography about the Nobel winning writer, known for works such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the article notes:
“Martin, a British expert in Latin American literature who is fluent in Spanish, spent 17 years writing and researching this biography. Garci´a Márquez calls Martin his "tolerated" biographer and sat for interviews.”
The Washington Post states: “The less said about García Márquez's political ventures the better, though in fact Martin goes on and on and on about them. García Márquez's laudable sympathy for the downtrodden, of whom Latin America has far too many, leads him, as it has led many others, to a reflexive support for charlatans and opportunists whose populist rhetoric bears little relationship to their self-aggrandizing deeds. But then there is scarcely anything new about political naiveté among the literati, as a whole host of American, British and European writers have demonstrated all too abundantly over the past few decades.”
The AP also notes: “Without being invasive, Martin's biography reveals the private Garci´a Márquez, as a man and as a writer. The result is a biography that is fresh and insightful about one of the most popular and influential writers of the 20th century.”
Read the AP review here.
