Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

by Gerald Martin, Bloomsbury, 688pp, £25
In July 1965, a Colombian writer living in Mexico City decided to take his family on holiday to Acapulco, said Philip Hensher in the Spectator. Although respected in a few literary circles, he was largely unknown and very hard up. Suddenly, on the road, a first line came into his head from nowhere: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

He turned around, went home, quit his job as a journalist and didn't stop writing until he had finished a book; he had to pawn his wife's hair-dryer to pay to send it to a publisher. It was One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel of "torrential imaginative force", which made Gabriel Garcia Marquez a global star, and popularised a new genre: "magic realism". Gerald Martin, "a respectable Anglo-Saxon biographer" who is well aware of his subject's tendency to embroider the truth, disputes many details of this story. But here, and throughout this book, he does a "good, thorough job" of giving both legend and fact.

Born in 1927, Garcia Marquez grew up in Aracataca, a "one-horse town" near Colombia's Caribbean coast, said Ed King in the Sunday Telegraph. His background was the source of his fictional universe: he was raised by his superstitious, near-hysterical grandmother, Tranquilina, and his grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Marquez, a veteran of Columbia's 19th century civil war (who fathered 17 illegitimate children and came to the town after killing a man in a village nearby).

The courtship between his wayward father and his long-suffering mother inspired his second most famous novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, about a relationship resumed after decades of interruption. Garcia Marquez's own life was equally exotic: he spent a year living in a brothel, writing letters for the prostitutes in lieu of rent. When he finally won recognition - including a Nobel Prize in 1982 - he became a hero to all Latin America, and a "firm friend" of Fidel Castro.

Garcia Marquez once remarked that "every self-respecting writer should have an English biographer", said Angel Gurria-Quintana in the FT. "He could have asked for none more accomplished than Gerald Martin, whose mammoth volume is the result of 18 years of research." Although not authorised, this is what Martin calls a "tolerated biography": he has been given "unprecedented" access to the author, his relatives and friends (including Castro). The result is "a monumental work".

FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 13, 2008