An oral history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight.
Irreverent 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 Garcia Marquez, and of how Gabriel Garcia Marquez survived his own self-creation. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, BC, before Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), his siblings speak and those who were friends before Garcia Marquez 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 Garcia Marquez became. From Aracataca, to Baranquila, to Bogota, to Paris, to Mexico City, the solitude that Garcia Marquez 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 Tomas Eloy Martinez, Edmundo Paz Soldan 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; Maria Luisa Elio, 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, Garcia Marquez’s chosen delegation, flying to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize celebrations; the time Mario Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face; and much, much more. In Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of Garcia Marquez’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 Garcia Marquez told in the words of those who knew him best throughout his life.
