Seventeen years in the making, author finishes first full biography of Nobel prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.


NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (MAY 26, 2009) REUTERS-
Almost two decades in the making, the first full and authorized biography of Latin giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez, arguably one of the most popular and influential writers of the late-20th century, hit bookshelves in the U.S. this Spring.
Gerald Martin, Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, started Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life in 1990. When he took on the project, Martin never expected to meet the 1982 Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and thought he would bang out an academic work based on secondary sources in a short amount of time. However, Martin met 'Gabo' almost immediately and the direction of his life and the project changed.

"This is a serious guy, as soon as I started I realized I just couldn't do a quick four-years-and-out book, this was a real serious writer who had a real complicated life, and it just wasn't worth rushing a book out," Martin told Reuters.

"I didn't think I'd take this long, of course," the expert in Latin American literature added.

After a series of meetings and interviews in the early 1990s, Garcia Marquez eventually considered Martin to be his 'official' biographer after which Martin met the novelist and conducted interviews with him at regular intervals throughout the 15-year research period. He not only spent many hours in conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself but also interviewed more than three hundred others, including Garcia Marquez's wife and sons, mother and siblings, literary agent and translators; Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alvaro Mutis, among other writers; Fidel Castro and Felipe Gonzalez, among other political figures; his closest friends as well as those who consider themselves his detractors.

The result is a revelation of both the writer and the man.

"I found out a lot of things," said Martin. "I think the biggest thing I found out is that despite all the talk about magic and all that stuff , this is a very, very ordinary, normal person with all the quirks that ordinary people have and with matters of genius that he has that other people don't have - that was one thing."

Garcia Marquez's story, however, is a remarkable one. Born in 1927, raised by grandparents and a clutch of aunts in a small backwater town in Colombia, the shy, intelligent boy matured into a reserved young man, first working as a provincial journalist and later as a foreign correspondent, whose years of obscurity came to an end when, at the age of forty, he published the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Within months, the book had garnered spectacular international acclaim, the author hailed as the standard-bearer of a new literature: magical realism, and thrusting him to the forefront of the so-called Latin Boom. Eight years later, in 1975, he published The Autumn of the Patriarch, and, in 1981, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, each novel rapturously received by critics and readers alike, and his previous works re-evaluated and published in multiple languages. With his books read by millions around the world, he had become a man of wealth and influence. But Garcia Marquez's parleyed that influence into a fervent, unflagging, and often controversial political and social activism.

"The other thing was that I don't think anybody knew how hard the man worked," Martin said about Gabo's activities. "He's worked so hard in his life that it just makes me tired just thinking about it."

Not to be outdone, Martin wrote more than 2000 pages with over 6000 footnotes about Garcia Marquez -- a version he hopes to publish later -- before condensing his work to 600 pages for the biography. In his work Martin details the rag to riches element of Garcia Marquez's story, the tension in his life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing; and between power, solitude and love; the contrast between his Caribbean background and the gloomier authoritarianism of highland Bogota; and his conscious but nonetheless extraordinary turn away from Macondo, magical realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude after those interlinked phenomena had brought him fame and unimagined wealth.

"A number of critics have said 'well he knows nothing about Garcia Marquez's secret life' - as if this was an extraordinary thing," said Martin.

"There are actually, just as Garcia Marquez says that in his novels, if you know how to read them, his entire autobiography is there - certainly his emotional autobiography is there," Martin explained. "So in my book there a lots of things that are nods and winks to things that if you know a lot about Garcia Marquez, you will be able to understand perhaps more than I appear to be saying."