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The Australian writer Peter Carey described Marquez at the time of his death as ‘the greatest writer of our time’, a judgement no doubt echoed in many quarters of the literary world. It was A Hundred Years of Solitude that did it, published when Marquez was 40. The author himself preferred The Autumn of the Patriarch, a tremendous study of tyranny and decadence notable for the absence of all punctuation whatever, but for most of us ‘Solitude’ is the one that made the difference. Readers of Living to Tell the Tale, which was planned as the first of a trilogy of reminiscence, may feel during the first 50 pages that they are to be treated to a continuation of the great book, or to its sourcebook and archive – as rich, inventive, unpredictable, grand and comic as ever – but after the inital trip with the author and his mother, the gears change, the rumble of the motor alters, the scenes and the personalities shift from the huge cast of siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and their dramatıc, cliff-edge lives – towards the world of provincial newspapers with their owners, writers, bars and bordellos, their interminable late nights of boozing and talking and, after another gearshift, to the art of writing itself as taught by some, practised by others and worshipped by everybody involved. What doesn’t change is the backdrop of Colombia itself, which is conveyed as the wildest, strangest, most tempestuous, passionate and intrıguing place in the whole world, with a geography so various and complex and extreme as to resemble an entire continent rather than just one not especially large country. Marquez is always aware of being a Colombian but specifically of being a Caribbean Columbian, with a cultural ancestry part black, part Creole, part Saragossan and a fostering environment that was hot, wet, steamy and fecund. The first journey to sub-Andean Bogota comes as a shock not only to the young Marquez but to his readers. Suddenly we are in the cold, elevated, drizzly and, to an extent, intellectualized capital. It is like another country, another people. It seems to me that this memoir was written primarly for a Colombian audience – not in the sense of excluding others but because only Colombians will be able to find their way through the jungle of names, places, events, histories, poets and politicians with which the memoir is full to the brim. I several times lost touch which newspaper the author was writing for, in which city, in which region and at what date. Not that it mattered too much. What came out of the long series of magazines, journals, newspapers and the people who wrote them was, above all, a collective dedication to the art of writing, and this most interesting and unusual comment: ‘I was set to thinking for the first time about the possibilities of journalism, not as a primary source of information but as much more: a literary genre. Before many years passed I would prove this in my own flesh, until I came to believe today more than ever, that the novel and journalism are children of the same mother.’
