33. Gabriel García Márquez - The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time

What's in a name. This is something that Romeo & Juliet have wondered in Shakespeare's famous novel. In this case. The whole meaning of the book is basically in the title. I've ploughed through another one of Gabriel García Márquez' books. This week a biography officially and hilariously called The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time.

This book is only a hundred pages long and the title therefore really does explain it all. A Colombian sailor is left shipwrecked on a little raft in the middle of the sea between Colombia and the US for ten days. Where he survives on nothing. He later tells Márquez, who used to be a newspaper journalist, the full story and he wrote newspaper articles about it. 

For the first time I enjoyed reading one of Márquez' novels. Maybe because this is the first time he isn't telling a story he invented himself. It's interestingly told and it doesn't get boring  like his other books(how can it when it only spans a hundred pages, is what you would think but then please reread my review of No One Writes to the Colonel). The title by the way, is a sarcastic remark by Márquez who is annoyed by the fact that this story will probably only be read by people because of his own famous name as he states in the preface: 

"I have not reread this story in fifteen years. It seems worthy of publication, but I have never understood the usefulness of publishing it. I find it depressing that the publishers are not so much interested in the merit of the story as in the name of the author, which, much to my sorrow, is also that of a fashionable writer. If it is now published in the form of a book, that is because I agreed without thinking about it very much, and I am not a man to go back on his word." (Márquez ix)

For me, however, it is the other way around. As you know I'm not a fan of the author's stories but in this case I'm very interested in his subject's story. I see this as a win-win situation for both me and Márquez.