When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
CLARIN

A Poem Of Life: Unpublished Letters Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A book by a longtime friend of the Colombian legend includes never-before-released letters from when Garcia Marquez was writing his epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

A Poem Of Life: Unpublished Letters Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
EFE/ Mercedes Bermejo

BOGOTA – Gabriel García Márquez's fascination when touching the snow for the first time, his discomfort with fame, sleepless nights while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. These are just some of the revelations in “Gabo. Letters and Memories,” by Plinio Apuyelo Mendoza, a longtime García Márquez friend, whose newly updated 2002 memoir of his experiences with the Nobel Prize winner has been re-released with 11 previously unpublished letters.

Published by Ediciones B in Spain and Latin America, and not yet translated into English, Gabo. Cartas y Recuerdos, offers a very human profile of the celebrated writer, whom Apuleyo Mendoza met in the late 1940s in a café in Bogotá, when both were aspiring journalists.

Apuyelo Mendoza, 80, recounts that Gabo was only 20 years old when they met, and Plinio five years younger. He would read the Colombian writer's manuscripts long before he broke through to international reknown.

But it was in Paris during the 1950s where the two would forge their friendship in the bars and cafes of the Latin Quarter. “Our friendship was born, three days after the arrival of García Márquez in Paris, when I invited him to dinner, and as we came out of the restaurant he saw the Boulevard Saint-Michel covered in snow,” Apuleyo Mendoza. He recalls his friend's “ecstatic and fascinated” face when he saw that “dreamy spectacle.”

In the French capital, García Márquez would wind up being fired from the Colombian newspaper “El Espectador” and began to “starve” while writing No One Writes To The Colonel, refusing monetary help from his friends.

Catastrophe or huge success

At the time, when the countries of Latin America were going through dictatorships, both friends decided to travel to the Soviet Union; “Socialism was a dream” remembers Apuleyo Mendoza. Even though, what they saw during their journey which also brought them to visit East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, would provoke a “deep uncertainty” in their careers as journalists, coming back very “disillusioned from the Communist world.”

“We lost faith, but when the Cuban Revolution happened, we took it as something new,” says Apuleyo Mendoza, whom helped launch the magazine “Libre” in Paris, a catalyzer of the Latin American narrative wave.

Fidel Castro would eventually ask to meet García Márquez, and the two are “friends to today,” Apuleyo Mendoza confirms. He adds: “Gabo is not a friend of Communism, but what has remained is a strong friendship with Fidel.”

"Gabo. Letters and Memories" also recounts their experience as journalists in Caracas, Bogota and Havana where they shared the same devotion for literature. With the approval of one of García Márquez’s sons Rodrigo, of whom Plinio is godfather, the author has included eleven unpublished letters that the Nobel Prize winner sent him from Mexico while he wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

“He would tell me about his anxieties and that he was worried about what his friends said about his work”, he thought “this could be a catastrophe or great success” and he understood it as a “long poem of everyday life”.

García Márquez considered fame “an inopportune visitor,” and Apuyelo Mendoza remembers how his friends promised that after his Nobel Prize offering, “nothing would change.”

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

The Foreign And Domestic Forces That Keep Russia's Military-Industrial Complex Turning

The continuing heavy shelling of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities shows that Russia still has more missiles than Ukrainians would have hoped. The look through the web of Kremlin diktats and murky international commerce that keeps the Russian military churning out hardware that drives the war in Ukraine

Two women look at a displayed tank from a platform

Tanks on display at the 2022 International Military and Technical Forum in Moscow, Russia

Bohdan Myroshnichenko

The continuing heavy shelling of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities shows that Russia still has more missiles than Ukrainians would have hoped.

For more than a year, Russia has denied that it has transitioned to a full war-time economy, pretending instead that the so-called "special military operation" is going according to plan. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is scrounging for every possible resource to support the war, spending record amounts to strengthen the army.

Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.

Sign up to our free daily newsletter.

Western sanctions were supposed to make this impossible – or at least complicated. But so far, Russia is still increasing its military spending and arms production, and finding ways to import prohibited components.

How is the Russian military-industrial complex increasing its capacity – and how much is the government spending on war?

In 2023, Russia will spend a record $357 billion from the federal budget on army and security forces – a 60% increase compared to 2021. Every third ruble from the federal budget goes to the war in Ukraine or to support the regime.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg: part of the war spending has been disguised in the budgets for education, social programs and support to individual regions and the economy overall.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest