His roaring twenties.

Living to Tell the Tale

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated by Edith Grossman

Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95, 484 pp.

Few literary memoirs have aroused such expectation as Living to Tell the Tale by Nobel Prize-winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This first volume (two more are in progress) takes us into his midtwenties, beginning with his eight years of uncertain if idyllic childhood with his maternal grandparents in the dusty village of Aracataca, on through his stint as rising staff writer for the Bogota daily El Espectador. The book ends in suspense: Gabito (his nickname) departs for Geneva on assignment to cover a "Big Four" summit; and in the last line he finds at his Swiss hotel a letter from his sweetheart Mercedes, who is replying to his marriage proposal. (For her answer, watch for volume 2.)

No review can do justice to the human and cultural richness packed into these pages. Northern Colombia's Caribbean ambiance is vividly conjured up with its luxuriant, suffocating heat, its bewitching folklore, and its dense meshwork of familial and quasi-tribal ties. The ever-expanding narrative comes teeming with accounts of Gabito's ten siblings and his uncles, aunts, cousins, and half brothers galore, as well as his oft-absent, dreamy father's failed moneymaking schemes and his once-rebellious mother's heroic efforts at creating order amid domestic chaos. Add to the clan Gabito's succession of many friends and colleagues and you get a cast of characters in the hundreds, each of them recalled and fleshed out by the novelist with loyalty and loving care.

Among the major subjects relived here is the special relationship enjoyed by little Gabito with his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Marquez, a close bond that will shape the rest of the boy's life. In addition, there are the inevitable accounts of adolescent sexual escapades in and out of brothels, and later of his being shipped out to distant boarding schools and the Universidad Nacional. The large forces of history intrude, and not just as backdrop: local political feuds big and small, the sinister and corrupting presence of the United Fruit Company, and the vast, apocalyptic Bogota riots of April 9, 1948 (Colombia's "9/11," as it were), in which thousands died and the entire downtown area was laid waste. Along the way we get a concrete feel for the towns where young Gabito dwelled--sleepy and impoverished Aracataca, gossip-ridden Sucre, entrepreneurial Barranquilla, chilly and proper Bogota, and the dazzling beauty of colonial Cartagena.

Permeating these events is Gabito's slowly growing vocation as a writer. From the book's very start we see his worried mother confronting the twenty-year-old dropout, urging him to return to his law studies rather than cling to some scantily paid scribbling jobs. She has good reasons. This book is, in great measure, the sad and desperate tale of a too-huge family treading water, day by day, in abject poverty, in which a choice must be made between a potato and the Sunday paper, and in which young Gabito is (unsuccessfully) sent by mama for some help from a local moneybags. And yet the burgeoning writer persists in his obsession, seeking encouragement from the village doctor, and actually finding it with his drinking buddies in Barranquilla, where he cranks out op-ed humor pieces, produces tentative, claustrophobic stories in the Kafka mold, and burns the midnight oil with his first novel Leaf Storm. The latter is sweated out in the long shadow of Faulkner, whose crucial legacy is almost another character in this initial life stage.

Lovers of Garcia Marquez's greatest works will thrill at encountering here the sorts of folk and the precise events that later went into the making of his masterly fictions. There are familiar surnames such as Cotes, Iguaran, and of course Buendia. There are female bedmates the names of whom he will retain in his classic narratives, here identified, in abundant and sensual detail, as Eufemia, Nigromanta, and Maria Alejandrina Cervantes. Like the lonely, retired colonel in the author's novels, Colonel Marquez really did spend his leisure time crafting little gold fishes, and waited fruitlessly for a government pension. The strange, clandestine courtship of Gabito's youthful parents is itself an amazing story that warrants its eventual refashioning in Love in the Time of Cholera. All this and much more: we witness the life experiences in the raw, before their elaboration into high art.

Living to Tell the Tale has narrative wonders beyond counting, though it lacks the formal perfection of the Colombian master at his best. The memoir was conceived following Garcia Marquez's long, alarming bout with lymphatic cancer, and one easily imagines its 1001-plus stories being poured forth with some sense of urgency. While the author himself, now seventy-six, may live well into his eighties (longevity runs in the family), this extensive backward glance is clearly the final reckoning of a man who's faced the abyss and now feels driven to tell all before it's too late. As a result, the volume is too long by about fifty to a hundred pages; there is some sloppy structuring; and several key incidents crop up more than once. Such flaws are also true, it goes without saying, of some of the most treasured world classics, and the treasures here are in abundance. In the end we're won over by what saved an adolescent Gabito as he sat for his high school oral exams: "my unexpected answers, my lunatic notions, my irrational inventions."

Edith Grossman's deft translation ably captures, with grace and delicacy, the atmosphere of the original. There are occasional lapses--"faculty of law" instead of "law school," "formation" instead of "upbringing," "porter" rather than "doorman," Spanish "Lovaina" in lieu of French "Louvain." Moreover, in a legal battle that Garcia Marquez reports concerning a con artist and a famous shipwrecked sailor, Grossman's English masculine pronouns pile up in a tangle of hims and hises that challenges comprehension. But this translation, a genuine labor of love, will decidedly endure.

Gene H. Bell-Villada, professor of Romance languages at Williams College, is the author of several books, including Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work (North Carolina) and The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand: A Novella & 13 Stories (Amador).