It took me nearly two full weeks to get through this biography. It clocks in at just over 650 pages, but the last hundred, approximately, are notes and indexes. It's not as hefty as it looks at first glance, but Gerald Martin doesn't skip details. He traces Marquez's life from before he was born, to the years he spent in Europe, to Mexico and Cuba, right up into the 2000s. Martin tracks and theorizes the literary influences and writing process for every one of Marquez's published novels, from One Hundred Years of Solitude, to Memories of my Melancholy Whores.
Gerald Martin shows us Marquez as not only a Latin-American Nobel prize winning writer, but also as a reader of Hemingway, a world traveler, a friend of Fidel Castro, and a man of political conviction. As I read, I couldn't help but romanticize Marquez. He lived in Paris. He wrote journal articles from behind the iron curtain. He ventured into the politics of revolution and war. How can I not see a Romantic figure?
At the same time, I got the sense that if I had known him, I wouldn't have liked him. I can't argue with his politics, or with his writing--which is unlike anything else I've ever read. It's Martin's version of Marquez, a somewhat arrogant writer who took pleasure in playing with the media, who seemed to want to divorce himself from nostalgia, that I don't like. Then again, maybe I would have liked him. Who can say? A biography is only a representation--a single perception--of a person.
