Alvah's Books

About a month ago, I wrote a review of Gerald Martin’s fabulous biography on ‘Gabo’ otherwise known as Gabriel Garcia Marquez for The Feminist Review. It’s finally been posted, but for a sneak preview below are the first two paragraphs:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
By Gerald Martin
Alfred P. Knopf
672 pages
$37.50

In his exhaustively researched biography of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Gerald Martin, who spent seventeen years examining every aspect of Marquez’s life and interviewing over 300 people, beautifully takes the reader through the life and times of one of Latin America’s most influential writers, a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the most popular novelist in the last fifty years.

Martin traces Márquez’s (or “Gabo” as he is affectionately referred to throughout the biography) early beginnings back to Aratacata’s early days and to the life of Colonel Nicholás R. Márquez Mejia, Gabo’s maternal grandfather, who played an influential and supportive role in the young boy’s life until he was swooped up by his nomadic parents at nine years old. It’s during that time, Martin writes, that the inspiration for One Hundred Years of Solitude was born and where Gabo learned of magic via his superstitious grandmother.

To read the rest of the review, please visit the Feminist Review’s blog.