Living to Tell the Tale (71 page)
Read Living to Tell the Tale Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,Edith Grossman
‘An imaginative writer of genius, the topmost pinnacle of an entire generation of Latin American novelists of cathedral-like proportions’
Guardian
In a decaying Colombian town the Colonel and his sick wife are living from day to day, scraping
together funds for food and medicine. Each Friday the Colonel waits for a letter to come in the post, hoping for the pension he is owed that will change their lives. While he waits the Colonel puts his hopes in his rooster – a prize bird that will make him money when cockfighting comes into season. But until then the bird – like the Colonel and his ailing wife – must somehow be fed …
‘Superb and intensely readable’
Time Out
‘An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December …’
When a witch doctor appears on the doorstep of the Marquis de Casalduero
prophesizing a plague of rabies in their Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims – until, that is, he hears that his young daughter, Sierva María, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive.
Sierva María appears completely unscathed – but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition,
it’s not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession and begin to see her supernatural powers as the cause of the town’s woes. Only the young priest charged with exorcising the evil spirit recognizes the girl’s sanity, but can he convince the town that it’s not her that needs healing?
‘Brilliantly moving. A tour de force’ A.S. Byatt
‘A compassionate, witty
and unforgettable masterpiece’
Daily Telegraph
‘At once nostalgic and satiric, a resplendent fable’
Sunday Times
‘The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years. Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘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 …’
Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Úrsula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía’s father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know
the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands.
Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, hauntings and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Buendía household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds…
‘Should be required reading for the entire human race’
New York
Times
‘No lover of fiction can fail to respond to the grace of Márquez’s writing’
Sunday Telegraph
‘It’s the most magical book I have ever read. I think Márquez has influenced the world’ Carolina Herrera
‘Filled with greedy joys, with small pleasures, polished like apples against a sleeve’
Observer
‘The first thing Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha …’
Their distant,
nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign land, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world …
Márquez’s strange pilgrims – the ageing prostitute preparing for death by teaching her dog to weep at her grave, the panicked husband scared for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a
long-haul flight from Paris – experience with all his humour, warmth and colour, what it is to be a Latin American adrift in Europe or, indeed, any outsider living far from home.
‘Celebratory and full of strange relish at life’s oddness. The stories draw their strength from Márquez’s generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent’ William Boyd
‘The most important writer of fiction
in any language’ Bill Clinton
‘Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself’
New Statesman