Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gerald Martin)

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. 

Balzac (Stefan Zweig)

Honeré de Balzac remains one of the most iconic French writers of all time. Although he is not as well known these days as Jules Verne or Alexander Dumas, he contributed more to literature than a great deal of his contemporaries, or writers today ever did or will. Balzac spent a good portion of his life living and writing in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century.As a young man, he convinced his bourgeois parents to allow him to abandon their chosen career and let him try his hand at writing.  Constantly in debt because of poor spending habits and disastrous financial ventures, Balzac wrote constantly, for most of his adult life, to stay one step ahead of his creditors. Despite writing over 91 novels, plays and essays, as well as newspaper articles and novels under pseudonyms (in the early days of his writing career), Balzac dug himself deeper into debt year by year and constantly changed addresses to outrun creditors. More than once he was saved from debtors prison through loans from his mother, rich friends and mistresses. 

Balzac`s chief project was a collection of novels which he titled La Comédie humaine. The complete collection was to include 150 volumes, but when Balzac died he left 46 unwritten. The novels were meant to portray his time and French life as it was in all classes and all walks of life. He wrote of the military, of politics, of rural life, city life and high society. 

I first read some of Balzac`s work in August, when I picked up A Distinguished Provincial At Paris, a novel from La Comédie humaine and used it as beach reading. Two weeks ago an a trip down across the border in New York State I came across this biography of Balzac, by Stefan Zweig, from 1946. I paid only $3.95 American for it, as it is a library discard and the dust jacket is missing. 

Having read this biography, I`ve come to the conclusion that although I love his work and will continue to love his work, I cannot love Balzac the man. I can feel sorry for him, as he spent much of his childhood at boarding schools and away from his parents. I can pity him for his inability to find a life-partner (who was not already married and who truly loved him for more than his fame). I can pity his poor looks and poor sense of fashion. However, I cannot pity his constant reckless spending, or his self-imposed loneliness. I cannot like him for the way he constantly sought out rich women with titles to seduce in hopes that they would take care of his debt problems and give him a carefree life. I cannot condone the affairs he began with married women. No, I do not like Balzac the man. I hope, however, over the course of my lifetime, to read all the completed works of La Comédie humaine because whatever else Balzac was, he was a magnificent and dedicated writer.