Scripting Gabriel García Márquez’s Life

Abstract Any biographical essay on the famous Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) must take into account biographies that have already been written—including, of course, Dasso Saldívar’s thoughtful García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla; La biografía (1997), Gerald Martin’s excellent Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (2008), and Stephen M. Hart’s Gabriel García Márquez (2010)—counterbalanced by García Márquez’s own autobiography, Vivir para contarla (2002). This article (1) sets out the intrinsically significant events of Gabo’s life and the impact they had on his development as a writer (journalist, film critic, cultural/political commentator, writer of short fiction and long fiction); (2) focuses on the osmosis between his life and his literary work, including an analysis of the first and only volume of his memoirs and how they overlap with his literary works and, indeed, are at times overwhelmed by them, as present in particular in El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), inspired by his parents’ love affair, in which the version of events provided by the novel supersedes the “real” sequence of events; and (3) uses the notion of doubleness—evident in his life via the opposition between his “real” family and his “false” family of illegitimate offspring, produced by his grandfather’s wanton ways, as well as the figure of the “double” in his fiction and particularly Cien años de soledad (1967)—as a structuring device of the article’s emplotment.