i still love garcia marquez

and i'm taking back everything i may have said to the effect that i don't anymore. i have recently finished reading Vivir Para Contarla (Living to tell the tale). i got my copy four years ago, as a gift from my cousin, but I only sat down to it last week. i read it overnight only because it is such a wonderful reminder of the world we are in when we read anything by garcia marquez. besides, he might not have long to live, and might not have much to write. god forbid. simba ko.



i'll post a more thorough review next time. or i might not, unless i find a way to detach myself a little bit more from the text. i can't help it, my response was -- as it has always been, when it comes to works of his -- very personal. and it goes back to the very first time i held a garcia marquez book in my hands. i can't help but associate it with so many other important things and events that are very personal to me as well. you see, my first exposure to garcia marquez was through One Hundred Years of Solitude. i still remember very vividly the day i discovered the book. it was my first day as a resident in kalayaan residence hall in UP. feeling like a millionaire, as i had just received, for the first time ever in my entire life of sixteen years, my entire allowance for the month, i proceeded to do a little book shopping at the booksale in the UP shopping center. and there it was, included in a pile of booksale books on super sale, its cover and title pages missing, but all the other pages still intact. i thought the title, which i just read from the header, was intriguing. i read the first few pages and, there is no other way to say it except to say that, they blew me away. i had no idea who garcia marquez was, what the book was all about, but as soon as i started reading it i couldn't stop. i decided to forgo sleep, breakfast, lunch, classes the following day (as i was bound to do for many more days and years to come). i was pleasantly shocked and embarrassed to find out later that garcia marquez was who/what he was and that, in my cousin's house , there was a shelf-full of garcia marquez books. and so, of course, i read all of them that entire semester. oh, and this is the same cousin who gave me my copy of Vivir -- see, there is a connection, some kind of organic unity here, after all!