Vivir para contarla.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Review of memoir by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Book Review

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Touted as the most anticipated book of the decade, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, Vivir para contarla--the first volume of a projected trilogy--lives up to expectations. In it the author re-creates his childhood and youth, bringing to life the places and people that will figure later in his novels. The book functions as a kind of guide to works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Love in the Time of Cholera, illuminating material familiar to readers and placing it in its real-life context.

When she was called a surrealist, Frida Kahlo rejected the label, insisting that she did not embrace any movement, but simply painted her own reality. The same is true of Garcia Marquez with respect to magical realism. The author has often said that he never wrote anything he didn't actually experience. Vivir para contarla depicts people and situations so beyond the pale that they seem fictional, even though they are elements of the author's childhood reality. The town that inspired Macondo and the "real" Buendias are sometimes so bizarre that they seem pure invention. They exude a magic that the author captures rather than concocts.

Vivir para contarla covers approximately the author's first thirty years, the formative period that stretches from his birth until the mid-1950s. The memoir conjures up the author as a struggling young journalist so scrawny that his own mother doesn't recognize him when she goes to ask him for help selling the family house in Aracataca, a town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The oldest of eleven children, Garcia Marquez had been born in that same town and lived there with his maternal grandparents until the age of eight. Since his grandparents' death, his mother no longer wishes to maintain the house. The trip is a pivotal experience in Garcia Marquez's development as a writer. For the first time, he sees his childhood home through fresh eyes, the eyes of a writer. He begins to conceive of his grandparents as the characters they will become, Jose Arcadio and Ursula Buendia.

The memoir provides countless insights into the author's craft. In many ways the book is a play of memories and a celebration of memory. The title itself suggests that life gains value in the remembering and...