Perspectives on the life and works of Gabriel García Márquez: Caribbean Troubadour

by Gustavo Arango

Overview

Perspectives on the life and works of Gabriel García Márquez: Caribbean Troubadour explores both the big picture and the small details about the Colombian Nobel Prize winner: his development as an artist, the construction of his public persona, the characteristics and the significance of his most relevant works, the secrets and the agonies of his trade, the blurred line between fact and fiction, and the recurrent themes of solitude, truth, love. Arango brings special attention to García Márquez’s Caribbean background, as well as the deep roots of his works in the tradition of the medieval troubadours. Archival materials, never before published in English, give the final touches to this portrayal of one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666916331
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/21/2023
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Gustavo Arango is professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta.

Table of Contents

Chronology

García Márquez most relevant works

Part I: On the Life and Works of the Caribbean Troubadour

Chapter 1. The Telegrapher’s Son

Chapter 2. The Truth of Fiction

Chapter 3. “The Verb Has Incarnated”

Chapter 4. The Living Manuscript

Chapter 5. The Verities of the Heart

Chapter 6. García Márquez and Cartagena de Indias, A Love Story

Chapter 7. Report on a Biblical Holocaust: On Pablo Escobar’s Medellín in News of a Kidnapping

Chapter 8. The Lesson of the Master

Chapter 9. The Awakening of the Sleeping Beauties

Chapter 10. A Defense of a Posthumous Novel

Chapter 11. Watermarks

Chapter 12. Caribbean Troubadour

Part 2: The Troubadour’s Files

Chapter 13. A Raconteur is Born

Chapter 14. News of a Cub Reporter

Chapter 15. A Revealing Letter

Chapter 16. From an Apocrypha Correspondence

Editorial Reviews

Gustavo Arango knows Gabriel García Márquez’s life and body of work like no one else. This book by an adoring, yet discerning, disciple is an homage to a great creator. After devoting most of his adult life to reading, lecturing and writing, Arango has come up with a magnificent analysis of one of the most important writers of the 20th century. After reading it, one can see the mechanics and secret correspondence of themes laid out in an intricate, albeit accessible, spider web, illuminating the meanders of a fascinating writer. His revealing translations of Carlos Fuentes’ and GGM’s correspondence will show you to what extent Fuentes’ friendship contributed to GGM’s success. It is also a passionate defense of his posthumous novel. May the powers that be soon decide to publish GGM’s See You in August, his legacy and the culmination of a splendorous career.”

Miguel Falquez-Certain

Gustavo Arango has written a remarkable work on Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one that combines biography and literary exposition, but transcends those boundaries, resulting in an insightful and beautifully written account of one of the greatest authors of this past century. Not only does he explicate and add meaning to Marquez’s best known books, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, he effectively makes the case that some of Marquez’s lesser known (at least in the Anglo-American world) are also remarkable works worthy of greater scrutiny. While Marquez’s work is most frequently associated with Magic Realism, Arango’s study reveals many other important aspects of Marquez’s work—as Marquez himself writes “My whole life and all my work have been trying to answer the question ‘What is loneliness?’”

Daniel G. Payne

Arango delivers a breathtakingly broad and deep portrait of Garcia Marquez’s life and work with the tone of a trusted colleague and the candor of a caring friend. Arango insists on understanding Garcia Marquez the author from within Garcia Marquez’s positionality because, as Arango says, an author’s work, “…is the expression of a person, and I never get tired of wanting to know about people I care about.” Arango’s combination of care for the person, and a deep scholarly knowledge of the entire oeuvre of Garcia Marquez’s work, results in a warm, intimate and truly enlightening account of one of the world’s most influential Latin American authors.”

Sarah K. Donovan