The New York Times has recently published two good pieces (an exploration of the origins of magical realism, and a book review) on Gerald Martin’s definitive English-language biography of Gabriel García Márquez titled, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

Janet Maslin recalls:

In a January 2006 interview with a Barcelona newspaper, Gabriel García Márquez, whose memory had begun to fail, deflected a question about his past. “You will have to ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin, about that sort of thing,” he said, “only I think he’s waiting for something to happen to me before he finishes.”

Fitting words from the man Gerald Martin calls the “Mark Twain of his own land: symbol of the country, definer of a national sense of humor and chronicler of the relation between the provincial realm and the center.”

Martin’s own writing is elegant and insightful.

“A kind of sea breeze of atmospheric moods blows across García Márquez’s work — a saline mood of unexplained and understated pathos, moods of delicate solidarity and even complicity with everything frail and cracked, a slightly morbid mood. And all of those moody currents seem to converge, in the end, on a single lush and regal emotion, which is nostalgia — García Márquez’s never-exhausted and always tender search for what he is not going to find: his own past, and his family’s, and the universe at his grandfather’s knee.”

“Unraveling the Labyrinthine Life of a Magical Realist” by Janet Maslin

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A Life By Gerald Martin, reviewed by Paul Berman

Read an excerpt