Living to tell the tale -gabriel marquez garcia

The memoir started with Garcia’s mother asking him to go with her to their hometown to sell their old house. Garcia’s life just seemed so unreal and dramatic that it felt more like fiction at times. I am also amazed at how he could possibly remember conversations and events which happened decades ago.  One finds riots, ghosts, assassinations, love, family, friends, poverty, deaths, passion, and so much more in his life story.
His father was bent on sending him to law school, which he obediently obliged for 2 years before deciding that there’s no way he could live being any other thing except a writer.  If he had not had the courage to rebel against his father, I guess we wouldn’t have 100 years of solitude and love in the time of cholera.
Garcia was an avid reader who was fortunate enough to meet other voracious readers who introduced him to the classics like Sophocles and the likes, which helped shaped his writing. I remember he was deeply impressed by kafka’s Metamorphoses, and thought the opening line of the story was the greatest thing ever written .
I guess I wasn’t quite as taken as he was. Went to borrow Kafka’s metamorphosis and I’m not exactly sure what’s so fascinating about a guy waking up to find himself having morphed into a cockroach. I guess the idea is startling and beyond imagination but the prose, I’m not so sure. The read was to be fair, intriguing enough to keep the reader entertained and the writing was moving enough that I felt the sorrow of Gregor and the frustration and impatience of his family at the end of the story. But was it something that blew me away? Not really.
Anyway I digress.
I love garcia’s Memoir and was moved by his passion for writing so much so that he was willing to go hungry for it. How many people in our time and especially in a place like Singapore, would be willing to make that kind of sacrifice?
The society has shaped our values of what’s important. We care too much about others’ opInions and the price tag they put on things. What is it that really matters to us?