“Today as I review my life”, “I can imagine now”, “I do not remember”, “My memories of that time are very fragmentary”, “The impression I have today”. These are a few of the indications that Gabriel Marquez is taking us down memory lane. “Living to tell the tale” (translated from Spanish by Edith Grosmman, Penguin Books, London, 2004) retraces Marquez’s life from his childhood, his struggles, the writers, friends and women who shaped his life, his loss of innocence, his family, and those who, in one way or another, had something to do with his writing career.

One striking feature, which makes reading his memoirs entertaining, is his keen sense of humour. On his parents’ marriage, he mentions that they married forty minutes late because the bride forgot the date and had to be awakened after eight in the morning.

He recounts his own birth with relish and one has the impression that he is looking back and enjoying the whole experience with boyish mischief and fascination. He recalls he was almost strangled by the umbilical cord because the widwife “lost control of her art at the worst possible moment” and Aunt Francesca lost even more control, running into the street shouting “A boy! It’s a boy!” as if the house was on fire. And then, as if sounding the alarm, “Rum! He’s choking!”, leaving you, for one moment, to wonder what rum has to do with giving birth to a boy.

At the age of six, he entered the laundress’ room and watched a childbirth till he was hastily dragged out with the admonition: “You’re in mortal sin… Don’t think again about what you have seen.”

Marquez remembers his mother suffering a fit of nostalgia one day and playing on the piano a waltz that reminded her of her secret love. His father could not help accompanying her on the violin, with his eyes getting tearful. With ferocious innocence and a pinch of suspicion, he asked her, “Who are you remembering?”

<B>Women shaped his personality </B>

Marquez’s invests simple, commonplace anecdotes with meaning, making them immensely lively and memorable. The reader cannot suppress the desire to re-read such portions and savour their brilliance.

It is the unusual combination of words that captures our imagination. A young man has the “warm voice of a harmonium”; one columnist is described as someone “with eyes of a dangerous blue”; a woman is remembered as having “ice in her eyes”; a manager had a “maternal belly”; a teacher asked him “a lethal question” in class; strips of newsprint are “folded like the bellows of an accordion”; at school he recites a long poem without the help of a prompter “more frightened than a Christian facing the lions”; and on being taken to his first piano-lesson, he looked at the piano “with the devotion of a stray dog”. Bogota was a place where “an insomniac rain” had been falling since the 16th century. One cannot remain insensitive to such an imaginative use of language.

Marquez recreates for us people, places and events that have played a decisive part in his life, both as an individual and as a writer. School days, towns, aunts, uncles, teachers, colleagues, friends, brothers, servants - everyone, everything comes alive with precise yet arresting descriptions.

We have here a set of characters, each closely observed and brought to us with significant details. Women have shaped his personality and he remembers them with sympathy and admiration, as these lines make clear: “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” and “They had strong characters and tender hearts, and they treated me with the naturalness of the Earthly Paradise.”

Marquez recounts that he had, unlike other children, a voracious appetite for listening to stories. It was his grandfather who gave him his first illustrated dictionary when he was five years old. The grandfather makes it clear that the book “not only knows everything but it’s also the only one that’s never wrong”. Marquez recognises that the book was fundamental in his destiny as a writer.

Budding writers sometimes experience doubts and apprehensions about what will be useful to them, and what will not, in their writings. They might have much to gain from Marquez’s observation that “there is nothing in the world or the next that is not useful to a writer.”

Marquez quotes one poet, Corranza, making an insightful point about poetry which, I think is worth repeating here: “If poetry does not make my blood run faster, open sudden windows for me on to the mysterious, help me discover the world, accompany this desolate heart in solitude and in love, in joy and in enmity, what good is poetry to me?”

You will enjoy the craftsmanship as well as the delightful prose. Take my word.

<B>Suresh RAMPHUL</B>