The next installments may or may not appear–Garcia Marquez, 75, is recovering from cancer–and though he’s surely the world’s most influential living writer, we may or may not stay tuned. “Living to Tell the Tale” abundantly exhibits his gift for observation: he recalls that soap opera being recorded onto a disc “with a needle like a plow that left tufts of black, luminous, almost invisible filaments, like angel hair.” The episode in which he travels with his mother to sell the old family home in a now deserted town is as powerful an evocation of loss, ruin and nostalgia as anything in his fiction. (That trip was Garcia Marquez’s breakthrough as a writer, leading him out of “rhetorical invention” into “poetic truth.”) But much of this memoir is just told, not evoked. The Colombian literary scene of the ’40s and ’50s is vivid in his memory, but not on the page; many anecdotes go nowhere, and seem to be set down just because they happened. We can only hope he lives to tell the good stuff better.
