X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Living to Tell the Tale


Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

García Márquez discusses this day at vivid length in the first volume of his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale.

Living to Tell the Tale

It focuses heavily on García Márquez' family, schooling, and early career as a journalist and short story writer, and includes references to numerous real-life events that ended up in his novels in one form or another, including the Banana massacre that appears prominently in One Hundred Years of Solitude and the friend of his whose life and death were the model for Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

The book was originally published in Spanish in 2002, with an English translation by Edith Grossman published in 2003.

No One Writes to the Colonel

In his memoir Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale, 2002), García Márquez explained that the novel was inspired by his grandfather, who was also a colonel and who never received the pension he was promised.



see also