Some tales are better left untold
The Book Worm
By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Some tales are better left untold
Living to Tell The Tale
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
533 pages
Published by Vintage International
IN the literary world, the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a god. For a Garcia Marquez fanatic like me, criticizing any of his works is almost blasphemy and leaving his book unfinished is sacrilege—of which I am now guilty. Garcia Marquez’s Living To Tell the Tale is a 533-page book. I made it only up to page 271.
Living To Tell the Tale is the first volume of his autobiography, in which he describes the circumstances surrounding his childhood and his occasional encounters with ghosts that apparently gave birth to magical realism in his novels.
He looks back to his indolent teen years. He was then an anti-education and sloppily-clad bum. He describes members of his family, who inspired the many bizarre characters in his novels.
The book revisits his old hometown in Aracataca, the basis of his fictional Macondo. Garcia Marquez recounts several episodes in his relatives’ and neighbors’ lives that have produced the seed for many of his great works. The love story of his parents produced Love in the Time of Cholera; the scandalous lampoons posted on the walls in the village later became In Evil Hour; and his grandparents failure to receive their veterans’ retirement pensions produced No Writes to the Colonel.
He recalls his foray into the writing world, acknowledging the people who brought him in. I have no idea how the whole story ends.
Not finishing a Garcia Marquez book all the way to the last page gives me—otherwise a die-hard fan—a sense of guilt.
So why did I not finish the book? Because it is spelled “disappointment.”
The work is almost bereft of the Marquezesque touch that his readers always look forward to: the magic interwoven into realism with a deadpan sense of presentation.
The first few chapters are promising. But the succeeding chapters, which have become tedious to read, fail to sustain the otherwise enchanting buildup.
Norman Mailer once remarked that García Márquez is “the only great writer who can handle forty or fifty characters and three or four decades.”
But in this autobiography, García Márquez failed to manage a huge crowd. The number of chapters devoted to the social events with his mentors is more than what one can handle. The enumeration of his friends is quite long and some of the names are forgettable. You’d get a feeling that he wrote these chapters to show gratitude to those who had helped him get his start. The result is disastrous. It slowed down the pace of the book and the characters are vaguely built.
The poetry and ghostly imagery, which Garcia Marquez is famous for, only come occasionally in Living To Tell the Tale. But, of course, this is autobiography, with factual events, and not one of his fiction works, where possibilities are endless and things that are impossible are possible.
Living To Tell the Tale tells all, offering too much information that demystify Marquez’s inspirations for his great novels and novelettes. Unfortunately, it spoils the spell of magic. Some tales are better left untold.
Living To Tell the Tale is a testament that a great writer should not write an autobiography.
I guess Living To Tell the Tale wouldn’t have been really bad if one doesn’t have any expectations. García Márquez wrote overwhelming oeuvres that have become the point of reference and comparison for each of his subsequent work.
Although his autobiography may not be on a par with his earlier works, Garcia Marquez remains on the Parthenon of my literary gods. He wrote two of the most remarkable novels–One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time Of Cholera—that should be read by the entire human race.
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