In English as in Spanish the title has several meanings. The most obvious one involves survival, hanging on after some disaster or adventure. Another suggests a telling which has become a life, perhaps even a compulsion or a doom, like that of the Ancient Mariner. And García Márquez himself spells out a third possibility: that you live, that you always have lived, for the sake of the future story, the one you will keep telling. 'Life,' the epigraph to this book says, 'is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.' This is an extreme claim, an assertion of what life is and isn't, and the book doesn't bear it out. But it does confirm the less extreme and more familiar claim. We do start living many moments as narrative before we've even finished living them as experience, and what García Márquez means is that this is just what a writer does - for a living.

LRB 3 June 2004 | PDF Download