Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Book Review 2: The General in His Labyrinth

People like writing about things they feel comfortable talking about. Either if it is because they know a lot about what they are talking about, or they understand it really well or if it is some other reason, they write really good things. This is  why Gabriel Garcia Marquez decided to write The General in His Labyrinth.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia. As a kid, Gabriel Garcia Marquez went through many struggles. He had to deal with death, and also moving a lot from place to place.  After he was born, his father became a pharmacist and in order to make money to support his family he had to move to Sucre, Bolivia to work as a pharmacist, but he took his wife with him to work in Sucre because it would have been really hard for him to make enough money to support his family. They left Marquez with his grandparents. Marquez grew up with his grandparents and knew them more than he knew his own parents. His grandfather was the one who started teaching Marquez how to read and to write, which eventually became Marquez's favorite thing to do. He told Marquez stories which made Marquez think deeply shaping his mind as a thinker and as a writer. Marquez's biggest struggle as a kid (when he was nine) was the death of his grandfather. That changed his whole life permanently and he ended up moving with his parents to Sucre,  Bolivia where his father owned a pharmacy after having lived nine years with his grandparents.  In Sucre, Bolivia he continued with his writing and eventually he realized he wanted to be a journalist.

He went to the University of Cartagena where his career as a journalist began. Marquez really liked to write about historic events and stories based in real experiences or events. One of the people he really wanted to write about was about Simon Bolivar. He read an unfinished book by his friend who was a writer Alvaro Mutis, which was about Simon Bolivar's last voyage. The story took place in Magdalena River, Colombia. Marquez felt really interested about the book and the story for two reasons: because he wanted to write about Simon Bolivar and because as a kid, he grew up living by the Magdalena River. He knew a lot about the setting so he asked permission to Mutis to take his idea and to write about Simon Bolivar and his last voyage in the Magdalena River, Colombia. That is how he ended up writing the book The General in His Labyrinth. He felt connected to the story because he knew about some of the characters and he knew the place. That made his book even better because he actually knew what exactly he was talking about.

  Had Bolivar not existed, Mr. Garcia Marquez would have had to invent him. Seldom has there been a more fitting match between author and subject. Mr. Garcia Marquez wades into his flamboyant, often improbable and ultimately tragic material with enormous gusto, heaping detail upon sensuous detail, alternating grace with horror, perfume with the stench of corruption, the elegant language of public ceremony with the vulgarity of private moments, the rationalistic clarity of Bolivar's thought with the malarial intensity of his emotions, but tracing always the main compulsion that drives his protagonist: the longing for an independent and unified South America. This, according to Bolivar himself, is the clue to all his contradictions. -The New York Times:Book Review

It is like Gracia makes up his own stories. Stories that are real he can make them seem like he wrote them. That is how good his writing is. 

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