Living to Tell the Tale

Product Information

A: English has a variety of pronounciations and languages, ranging from the West Indies to the East Indies, and a number of places in between. Similarly, during the age of discovery, Spain colonized vast territories in Latin America, and these versions of Spanish have been evolving for a good 500 hundred years; you can imagine the range and breadth of vocabulary and usage. Because García Márquez’s Spanish is predominantly Colombian, I am obliged to learn a number of words that exist nowhere else. He uses regionalisms, expressions that are limited to a particular class, words confined to a small town or a particular district. I consulted with three Colombians on some lexical puzzles in this book, and even they had trouble with some of them. One excused himself by saying this was a phrase from the mountains whereas he came from the coast. Another pivotal event in his life comes 9 April 1948, with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

Which is why the flow of refugees from Syria to Europe has resonance for the former boat people. “I cried when I saw the news about Germany taking all those refugees,” said Huy. “I was quite surprised they were that open to that many people. I was really moved by what the Germans did. I think the British could have done more.” Vivir para contarla (now translated as Living to Tell the Tale) offers a wonderful glimpse of much that inspired and formed his fiction. Gabriel García Márquez's experiences and his family colour much of his fiction, but part of García Márquez's great talent is how he takes fact and recreates it as fiction. After the success of the California reunion, Quan organised a follow-up in London five years later. “Growing up in Peterborough I’d often wonder where the crew were now,” she said. “It was a very emotional event to meet all these people at last. For us, they were heroes. We wanted to show them our children. We wanted to say: ‘Look, they wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there for us.’ It was a huge thing that they did. They could have chosen to turn a blind eye like the other ships. But they didn’t and they risked a lot to rescue us.”Trying to convince my parents of this kind of lunacy, when they had placed so much hope in me and spent so much money they did not have, was a waste of time. My father in particular would have forgiven me anything except my not hanging on the wall the academic degree he could not have. Our communication was interrupted. Almost a year later I was still planning a visit to explain my reasons to him when my mother appeared and asked me to go with her to sell the house. But she did not mention the subject until after midnight, on the launch, when she sensed as if by divine revelation that she had at last found the opportune moment to tell me what was, beyond any doubt, the real reason for her trip, and she began in the manner and tone and with the precise words that she must have ripened in the solitude of her sleepless nights long before she set out. Q: What is different about translating this book of non-fiction as opposed to translating the novels? When family duties called he put aside his own priorities for some time but writing is all he seems fit for. As the passengers grew more fearful, Hung’s mother called for him and 15-year-old Huy to sit with her. “She called all the kids over so she could see us. We didn’t really understand, but now we know,” said Huy.

Don't worry about it," I said with the same innocence. "In December I'll go myself and explain everything to him." But official hostility was rising. Within a few months Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, confronted with four more British ships rescuing hundreds of boat people. She was strongly against taking them in, ostensibly on the grounds of being “fearful of UK public opinion”, even though the UK had accepted only a tiny fraction compared to the 250,000 Vietnamese refugees admitted by the US and 60,000 by France. A Home Office memo warned that accepting more “would be seen as leading to an influx of immigrants which we could not control”. Thatcher eventually relented over the ships already carrying boat people, but demanded “a cast-iron position in legal and political terms which would enable the UK to hold out against admitting refugees”. She also wanted Britain to withdraw from the 1951 refugee convention.

Customer reviews

I’m one of Thatcher’s children’: Diep Quan, now an IT trainer, at Morgan Stanley in Canary Wharf, London. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer What is the tone in which García Márquez recounts his life? How intimate is his relationship with the reader? What is his own attitude toward his younger self? Critic Michael Wood has noted that the book suggests “again and again, that the world this writer grew up in was effectively a García Márquez novel before he even touched it” [ London Review of Books, 3 June 2004, p. 3]. García Márquez himself comments on this phenomenon when he writes, “It was not one of those [stories] that are invented on paper. Life invents them” [p. 528]. Is it true that the sense of fecundity, the density of inspiration, and the frequent occurrence of improbable happenings provided García Márquez with exactly what he needed for his art? Discuss a few events in his novels that you now know have their origins in the author’s life. Yet its sum is not a Bildungsroman of the author, whose personality is rarely front-lit, but the re-creation of an astonishing universe, the Caribbean coastlands of Colombia in the first half of the last century. Anyone who might think that a factual counterpart of García Márquez's fictions could be at best only a pallid duplicate can be reassured. Scene after remarkable scene, character after arresting character, cascades of gestures without measure and coincidences beyond reason make Living to Tell the Tale a cousin of the great novels." - Perry Anderson, The Nation García Márquez, whose splendid memoir of his first three decades, Living to Tell the Tale, is a swoon of swans" - John Leonard, Harper's

It's more comfortable," I said. "Two shirts and two pairs of undershorts: you wear one while the other's drying. What else does anyone need?"

I remember going down the corridor with one of the girls, chattering away in Cantonese. The deputy head – I was petrified of her – stopped us and said: ‘No, no, no, you should be speaking English in school.’ My dad found a job at a textile company owned by a Greek family. He would open up the factory first thing in the morning. At one point he spoke English with a Greek accent.” Quan speaks with an unmistakable London accent. A: I don’t think there is much difference. García Márquez keeps pointing out that fiction and journalism are essentially the same genre. For example, the British press couldn’t believe that the events depicted in News of a Kidnapping, which is an investigative report about murder and kidnapping in Colombia, actually happened, and it ended up listed as fiction.