Solitude & Company: The Life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Told with Help from His Friends, Family, Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters

Description

An oral history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight. Irreverent and hopeful, Solitude & Company recounts the life of a boy from the provinces who decided to become a writer. This is the story of how he did it, how little Gabito became Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and of how Gabriel Garcia Marquez survived his own self-creation. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, BC, before Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), his siblings speak and those who were friends before Garcia Marquez became the universally loved Latin American icon. Those who knew him when he still didn't have a proper English tailor nor an English biographer, and didn't accompany presidents. It gathers together the voices around the boy from the provinces, the sisters and brothers, the childhood friends, the drinking buddies and penniless fellow students. The second part, AC, describes the man behind the legend that Garcia Marquez became. From Aracataca, to Baranquila, to Bogota, to Paris, to Mexico City, the solitude that Garcia Marquez needed to produce his masterpiece turns out to have been something of a raucous party whenever he wasn't actually writing. Here are the writers Tomas Eloy Martinez, Edmundo Paz Soldan and William and Rose Styron; legendary Spanish agent Carmen Balcells; the translator of A Hundred Years of Solitude Gregory Rabassa; Gabo's brothers Luis Enrique, Jaime, Eligio and Gustavo, and his sisters Aida and Margot; Maria Luisa Elio, to whom A Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated; and so much more- a great deal of music, especially the vallenato; the hilarious scenes of several hundred Colombians, Garcia Marquez's chosen delegation, flying to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize celebrations; the time Mario Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face; and much, much more. In Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of Garcia Marquez's autobiography, Gabo writes- "I am consoled, however, that at times oral history might be better than written, and without knowing it we may be inventing a new genre needed by literature- fiction about fiction." Solitude & Company joins other great oral histories, like Jean Stein and George Plimpton's Edie- American Girl, their oral history biography of Edie Sedgwick, or Barry Gifford's oral history of Jack Kerouac, Jack's Book--an intimate portrait of the most human side of Gabriel Garcia Marquez told in the words of those who knew him best throughout his life.

Journalist and writer Silvana Paternostro was born in 1962 in Barranquilla, Colombia. She has written extensively on Cuba and Central and South America as well as on women's issues, AIDS, revolutionary movements, underground economies, and the intersection of culture with politics and economics. Her book In the Land of God and Man- Confronting Our Sexual Culture explores gender roles and the effect of government and religion on women's lives in Latin America, and was nominated for the PEN/Martha Abrams Award for First Nonfiction. Her expose of re-virginization centers in the US appeared in the book Se Habla Espanol- Voces Latinas en USA, the first anthology of new Latino voices in the United States published in Spanish. Her second book, My Colombian War- A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind (Henry Holt, 2007), mixes memoir with history and reportage to tell the story of Colombia's 40-year-old civil war and uncover the truth about US involvement in the country. Silvana is a contributing editor of Bomb magazine and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and numerous other publications. Her work is frequently translated and re-printed, especially in Latin America. In 1999 she was selected by Time/CNN as one of 50 Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium. She was also associate producer on Che- The Argentine and Che- Guerrilla, a two part movie based on the life of Che Guevara, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio del Toro, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 She lives in New York City and Colombia. Translator EDITH GROSSMAN is one of the most renowned Spanish-to-English translators of our time. In addition to translating seven of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novels, including Love in the Time of Cholera and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, she has translated works by Miguel de Cervantes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Ariel Dorfman, to name a few. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a PEN Ralph Manheim Medal, an Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and many other awards and honors. She teaches at Columbia University in New York City.

"Charming and rowdy ... it's a book that gathers his old friends together, as if around a table, and lets them talk." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Solitude & Company is outstanding as a work of journalism and a pleasure to read. This is as close as you'll ever get to spending a day with the master himself." -Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling "Solitude & Company captures Gabo-the man, the times and the places that created him. How a man from the Caribbean made a universe that the world embraced. Everyone who loves Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work will enjoy this wonderful book." -Benicio Del Toro "A disquieting portrait of the man who propelled Latin American writing into the global markets. Nobody is more judgmental or crueler than the friends we made before we came to be whatever we are, but at the same time nobody can be more generous and accurate. The perhaps savage honesty of the persons who knew good old Gabo before he reached the stratosphere with the publication of his landmark novel One Hundred Years of Solitude-many of them characters in the book-offers tools to understand the person of the author better than the hagiographic writing of academic biographers." -Alvaro Enrigue, BookPost "If I may be allowed to mix up a metaphor: This is a kaleidoscopic cocktail of voices-vibrant, eloquent, intoxicating-inspired by that endlessly fascinating literary magician Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a.k.a. Gabo/Gabito/etc.). And the cocktail has been mixed and shaken, expertly and knowingly, by Silvana Paternostro. !Salud!" -Gerald Martin, author of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life "This magnificent research brings an unprecedented, different, and revealing perspective." -Huffington Post "It would be difficult to imagine a writer and editor more qualified to assemble this oral history of Garcia Marquez than Silvana Paternostro. Coming from the world and culture that spawned magical realism, she studied under and has continued to study the master of the genre; yet she has lived in America long enough to have a firm command of its cultural nuances, as well. Add to that her own gifts as an analyst and storyteller, and you have a volume that is both deeply insightful and a fitting testimonial-in short, an absolute gift." -Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist and The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians. "Irresistibly readable and fun, it's a perfect accessory to the age of twitter. A world of storytelling in which nothing is false and everything is possible." -Melik Kaylan, Forbes "It's a unique glimpse into the life of a man who has become as much a myth as the magical stories he penned, as only someone like Paternostro could have crafted over decades of dedication." -Santa Fe Reporter "Solitude & Company is a human, fresh, and irreverent portrait of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in which the voices of his friends, his loved ones, and even his detractors, who had never shared their stories, are interwoven." -Educacion y Cultura AZ "If I may be allowed to mix up a metaphor: This is a kaleidoscopic cocktail of voices-vibrant, eloquent, intoxicating-inspired by that endlessly fascinating literary magician Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a.k.a. Gabo/Gabito/etc.). And the cocktail has been mixed and shaken, expertly and knowingly, by Silvana Paternostro. !Salud!"- Gerald Martin, author of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life "Silvana Paternostro offers readers a chance to listen in on the whispers within the magic factory that gave birth to One Hundred Years of Solitude ... Paternostro is every bit the ingenious journalist that Marquez always aspired to be."- Srimoyee Bagchi, The Telegraph "This superb book is biography minus the moral obligation or dutiful reverence--or, in other words, without the boring bits." --The Spectator