Quan organised an extended family holiday to her birthplace in 2012. Eighteen people, including her husband and their daughter, who had never been to Vietnam, travelled around the city she knew as Saigon in a minibus. She said that by the time the visit was over she knew she belonged in London more than Vietnam, even if that was her history. But she suspected her father felt differently.

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of Gabriel García Márquez’s proposed three-part memoir. We hope they will provide useful ways of thinking and talking about the life story of one of the greatest Latin American writers of our time. Introduction urn:lcp:livingtotelltale00garc:epub:c7c573f4-838f-4954-a619-a2ed9a8ca9da Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier livingtotelltale00garc Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9k36nb3n Isbn 1400041341Vivir para contarla es, probablemente, el libro más esperado de la década, compendio y recreación de un tiempo crucial en la vida de Gabriel García Márquez. En este apasionante relato, el premio Nobel colombiano ofrece la memoria de sus años de infancia y juventud, aquellos en los que se fundaría el imaginario que, con el tiempo, daría lugar a algunos de los relatos y novelas fundamentales en la literatura en lengua española del siglo XX. From his early childhood in a female-dominated household through schooling that barely interested him (as he sat through his classes with an open book on his knees, constantly reading) it was an odd and yet convincing sort of childhood idyll.

Q: What do you find to be most challenging and most rewarding about translating García Márquez’s books? García Márquez circles around in this memoir, focussing on the years when he actually became a writer (in his early twenties) but returning to his own childhood and youth and how the experiences from those times made him the writer he was becoming. 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 ObserverDiep Quan studied for a degree in business and accounts. “I’m one of Thatcher’s children. Business. Got to go make money. Still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew that was the stepping stone to get to where the money is.” Today, she works as an IT trainer on contract to Morgan Stanley. After the success of the California reunion, Quan organised a follow-up in London five years later. “Growing up in Peterborough I’d often wonder where the crew were now,” she said. “It was a very emotional event to meet all these people at last. For us, they were heroes. We wanted to show them our children. We wanted to say: ‘Look, they wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there for us.’ It was a huge thing that they did. They could have chosen to turn a blind eye like the other ships. But they didn’t and they risked a lot to rescue us.” Living to Tell the Tale has the usual metaphysical speculations on death and grotesquerie of grinning skulls that we associate with "magic realism". Yet the book radiates a charm and humanity sometimes absent from earlier Marquez. It is rich with allusion and suggestion, and moreover is often very funny" - Ian Thomson, Independent on Sunday 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?

Unele pagini sînt de un umor nebun. Într-o zi, e prins de un soț în patul consoartei, pe nume Nigromanta, o femeie superbă, cu „un profil abisinian”. Soțul This was the 1970s, when the National Front and casual racism loomed large in Britain. “We had all the usual taunts walking to school – racist names,” said Quan. “I’d hear stories from my mum all the time. The adults themselves felt it more keenly. They found it really hard.” It is also a family memoir, as Garcia Marquez describes the households he grew up in and his close relatives and their various endeavours -- and the constant struggle to just get by.For several years García Márquez has been fighting cancer. This struggle has made it hard for him to continue creating his imaginary worlds - the English version of his last novel, Of Love and Other Demons, dates from 1995. Instead, his efforts have gone almost exclusively into the search for the lived reality behind the fiction: the somewhat ominously titled Living to Tell the Tale is the first volume of three he has planned. It is filled with wonderful scenes and details, as García Márquez casually introduces all sorts of bits of information and experiences, from a flight in which it rains in the plane, to paying a gratuity to someone who had gotten the necessary vaccinations in his place (as that person had done "daily for years" for those in a hurry) to his pseudonym for his column in El Heraldo (Septimus, after Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). Another pivotal event in his life comes 9 April 1948, with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Then it's better if I tell him the whole truth right away," she said, "so it won't seem like a deception." You say that so as not to mortify me," she said. "But even from a distance anybody can see the state you're in. So bad I didn't even recognize you when I saw you in the bookstore."