Avid readers always look out for opportunities to read and relish interviews of their favourite authors. After all, there is better way to glean a writer than from a heart to heart conversation. The Last Interview: Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Other Conversations takes this literary conversation to another level altogether.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a Colombian author. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in the year 1982. He is considered as one of the most significant influences and voices of the last century.
The book, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Streitfeld comprises of a series of interviews with the author. It basically consists of five curated and highly detailed, informative and revealing interviews. The earliest interview dates back to 1956 and the renowned author’s last interview dates to the year 2006.
The interviews have been carefully curated and handpicked. Some of them were originally published in other languages, mainly Spanish, and have been translated into English in the book.
Taken together they cover the entire writing life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose fierce activism was always woven with the literature he produced. The interesting mix of interviews reveals his writing process, his deep involvement with political matters in Latin America, his activism, his views on power and how it corrupts as well as little known tidbits from his writing life. It also includes the writer’s insights into subjects such as the meaning of true love and quite interestingly, the validity of superstitions.
Interestingly, the book includes his first ever interview, that was taken before he wrote the book “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, which took him to dizzying heights of success. It provides an intimate glimpse into the mind of the young writer at that time. Quite predictably, it also contains his last interview. Somehow, it makes fans of the writer view his life in full circle.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a prolific and powerful writer. This book only exemplifies this fact through a unique insight into key conversations that he has had with the media in his lifetime.
The Last Interview: Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a quick but impactful read. It is apt for those who love the master, and also for those who are just getting acquainted with his books.
The Last Interview: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edited and with an introduction by David Streitfeld
Publisher:Melville House Publishing,
