If it hadn’t been for his father, Craig Holmes might never have returned the graduation ring given to him 30 years earlier by a teenage girl he helped rescue from the South China Sea. Holmes was training to be a navigator on board a British ship hauling a cargo of millet to Taiwan in the autumn of 1978. Off the Vietnamese coast, the hulking steel vessel crossed paths with a small, crowded and leaking wooden fishing boat holding Luisa Van Nu and 345 other people fleeing the communist takeover of their country. García Márquez talents were fairly obvious from early on: he didn't exert himself academically, but his prodigious reading (and a good memory that allowed him to recite vast amounts of poetry) allowed for impressive displays that won over his teachers. When family duties called he put aside his own priorities for some time but writing is all he seems fit for. I didn't marry until I had my parents' blessing," she said. "Unwilling, I grant you, but I had it."

The Wellpark sailed on to Taiwan, where the government was sympathetic, sending food and clothes to the ship, but insisted they would not be allowed to leave the ship until the UK agreed to take them in. After two weeks of pictures of the destitute refugees on the news, the British government said it would bring them to London. “This is when we realised who we had on board,” said Holmes. “Doctors and nurses. A couple of lawyers. We had a whole typing pool. There were typewriters banging away, doing all the paperwork.” García Márquez writes, “I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood” [pp. 74–75]. Why were women so important to him? How are the women different, in roles or in attitudes, from the men in García Márquez’s life? How does he portray his relationship with his mother?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached me like a remote echo and moved me only when it spilled over into rivers of blood” [p. 401]. What does the memoir convey about Colombia’s troubled political history? How critical to García Márquez’s formation as an adult was the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the violence that followed [pp. 312–13]? How is the experience of political upheaval here reflected in the historical or political consciousness of his fiction? 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?" Living to Tell the Tale is a succulent memoir and delivers a powerful lesson in storytelling -- and is also a delightful read." - Angel Gurria-Quintana, The Observer Q: What do you learn about Spanish-language/Latin American literature when you translate García Márquez? He can imagine practically nothing else, and knows his law-studies won't bear fruit, pursuing them merely to pelase his family while he writes -- and reads and read and reads.

García Márquez is at a crossroads, having just abandoned his law studies and now spending all his time reading and writing -- but not having established himself as the sort of writer he wants to be yet.

Translation is an art and behind every great foreign-language author, there is a great translator capturing the tone, energy, and nuances of the work. For twenty-three years, Edith Grossman has been working with Gabriel García Márquez. As an award-winning translator of poetry and prose by several Spanish-language writers, she has mastered the skill of representing different tones and dialects, many of which we are not familiar with in America. Here, she talks about the experience of translating García Márquez’s most recent work, this long-awaited memoir. 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. Returning with his mother to sell the family home confirms in García Márquez his determination to be a writer. But he had been expelled from the Caribbean eden many years before, when his family sent him to the Colombian capital, Bogota, to study. Although Aracataca and Bogota are part of the same country, they could not be more different. Where the Caribbean province offered warmth, family, friends and a world full of magic, the capital, high up in the Andes, was "a remote, lugubrious city where an insomniac rain had been falling since the beginning of the 16th century".