The Autumn of the Patriarch (34 page)
Read The Autumn of the Patriarch Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,Gregory Rabassa
‘A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn’t find. A thrilling miracle of a book’
The Times
Living to Tell the Tale
spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in Colombia in 1927, through his emerging career
as a writer, up to the 1950s and his proposal to the woman who would become his wife. Insightful, daring and beguiling in equal measure, it charts how García Márquez’s astonishing early life influenced the man who, more than any other, has been hailed as the twentieth century’s greatest and most-beloved writer.
‘An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women’
The Times
‘It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love …’
Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed
since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half century, Florentino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. Having sworn his eternal love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again.
When Fermina’s husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot
from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?
‘A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy’
Newsweek
‘A delight’ Melvyn Bragg
‘A velvety pleasure to read. Márquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humour, a love letter to the dying light’ John Updike
‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself a gift of a night of wild love with
an adolescent virgin …’
He has never married, never loved and never gone to bed with a woman he didn’t pay. But on finding a young girl naked and asleep on the brothel owner’s bed, a passion is ignited in his heart – and he feels, for the first time, the urgent pangs of love.
Each night, exhausted by her factory work, ‘Delgadina’ sleeps peacefully whilst he watches her quietly. During these
solitary early hours, his love for her deepens and he finds himself reflecting on his newly found passion and the loveless life he had led. By day, his columns in the local newspaper are read avidly by those who recognize in his outpourings the enlivening and transformative power of love.
‘Márquez describes this amorous, sometimes disturbing journey with the grace and vigour of a master storyteller’
Daily Mail
‘There is not one stale sentence, redundant word, or unfinished thought’
The Times
‘A story only a writer of Márquez’s stature could tell so brilliantly’
Mail on Sunday
‘She looked over her should before getting into the car to be sure no one was following her …’
Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron; ruthless manipulator,
brutal killer and
jefe
of the infamous Medellín cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts.
Terrified of the new Colombian President’s determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining
tools he could find: hostages.
In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Márquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark and volatile months.
‘Reads with an
urgency which belongs to the finest fiction. I have never read anything which gave me a better sense of the way Colombia was in its worst times’
Daily Telegraph
‘A piece of remarkable investigative journalism made all the more brilliant by the author’s talent for magical storytelling’
Financial Times
‘Compellingly readable’
Sunday Times