My favourite: Gabriel Marquez
I've been extravagantly enjoying myself in the sea of Gabriel Marquez's stories and lost my sense of time. I felt like I was going back in time to 1940s-1960s in Colombia when reading his Living to Tell the Tale, in which Marquez tells the story of his life with his masterful writing saturated with enchantments.The book reveals many an antonishing and unbelievable snippet of his early life which never fail to cause my heart racing with joy or my body stiffened with tension. Here is one of them:
Marquez was on board a schooner to Bogota where he was to sit an examination for a scholarship. He spotted a taciturn guy who spent most of his time alone reading on deck; Marquez paid attention to him because that guy was reading a book Marquez had been longing for. To kill his time, Marquez with other passengers sang the nights away until dawn. One day, the taciturn guy came up and asked him to write down the keys of the tune he sang the previous night. Marquez was more than happy to do so and taught him the skills of singing and then they chatted a bit about the book. Later, the taciturn guy gave the book to Marquez as a token of appreciation when they disembarked.
The examination was a keen one as people like Marquez came rushing from all cities to Bogota in hope of getting the scholarship. Plus he was late to the exam and found the questions not easy to handle. He messed up the exam. But surprisingly he was granted the scholarship because it turned out that the national director of scolarships was the taciturn guy.
posted by May @ 12:05 PM
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