Solitude & Company

An oral history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garc a M rquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight. Irrevent and hopeful, Solitude & Company recounts the life of a boy from the provinces who decided to become a writer. This is the story of how he did it, [...]
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An oral history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garc a M rquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight. Irrevent and hopeful, Solitude & Company recounts the life of a boy from the provinces who decided to become a writer. This is the story of how he did it, how little Gabito became Gabriel Garc a M rquez, and of how Gabriel Garc a M rquez survived his own self-creation.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, BC, before Cien a os de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), his siblings speak and those who were friends before Garc a M rquez became the universally loved Latin American icon. Those who knew him when he still didn't have a proper English tailor nor an English biographer, and didn't accompany presidents. It gathers together the voices around the boy from the provinces, the sisters and brothers, the childhood friends, the drinking buddies and penniless fellow students.
The second part, AC, describes the man behind the legend that Garc a M rquez became. From Aracataca, to Baranquila, to Bogota, to Paris, to Mexico City, the solitude that Garc a M rquez needed to produce his masterpiece turns out to have been something of a raucous party whenever he wasn't actually writing. Here are the writers Tom s Eloy Mart nez, Edmundo Paz Sold n and William and Rose Styron; legendary Spanish agent Carmen Balcells; the translator of A Hundred Years of Solitude Gregory Rabassa; Gabo's brothers Luis Enrique, Jaime, Eligio and Gustavo, and his sisters Aida and Margot; Mar a Luisa El o, to whom A Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated; and so much more: a great deal of music, especially the vallenato; the hilarious scenes of several hundred Colombians, Garc a M rquez's chosen delegation, flying to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize celebrations; the time Mario Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel Garc a M rquez in the face; and much, much more.
In Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of Garc a M rquez's autobiography, Gabo writes: "I am consoled, however, that at times oral history might be better than written, and without knowing it we may be inventing a new genre needed by literature: fiction about fiction." Solitude & Company joins other great oral histories, like Jean Stein and George Plimpton's Edie: American Girl, their oral history biography of Edie Sedgwick, or Barry Gifford's oral history of Jack Kerouac, Jack's Book--an intimate portrait of the most human side of Gabriel Garc a M rquez told in the words of those who knew him best throughout his life.