How long does it take to read Gabriel García Márquez?
a life
Gerald Martin
Gabriel García Márquez by Gerald Martin takes about 13 hours 20 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 13 hours 20 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2008. 727 pages, about 199,925 words.
27 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 22 hours 13 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 13 hours 20 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 8 hours 20 minutes |
The page count is the median across 16 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The first full and authorized biography of the 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature--the most popular international novelist of the last fifty years.Over the course of the nearly two decades Gerald Martin gave to the research and writing of this masterly biography, he not only spent many hours in conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself but also interviewed more than three hundred others, including Garcia Marquez's wife and sons, mother and siblings, literary agent and translators; Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alvaro Mutis, among other writers; Fidel Castro and Felipe Gonzalez, among other political figures; his closest friends as well as those who consider themselves his detractors. The result is a revelation of both the writer and the man.Garcia Marquez's story is a remarkable one. Born in 1927, raised by grandparents and a clutch of aunts in a small backwater town in Colombia, the shy, intelligent boy matured into a reserved young man, first working as a provincial journalist and later as a foreign correspondent, whose years of obscurity came to an end when, at the age of forty, he published the novel entitled Cien anos de soledad--One Hundred Years of Solitude. Within months, the book had garnered spectacular international acclaim, the author hailed as the standard-bearer of a new literature: magical realism. Eight years later, in 1975, he published The Autumn of the Patriarch, and, in 1981, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, each novel rapturously received by critics and readers alike. With his books read by millions around the world, he had become a man of wealth and influence. Yet, for all his fame, he never lost touch with his roots: though he had lived outside of Colombia since 1955--in Barcelona, Mexico City, Paris--his Nobel Prize was celebrated by Colombians from all walks of life who thought, and still think, of "Gabo" as their own. More books followed, both fiction (Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in his Labyrinth…
Subjects: Colombian Authors, Biography, Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Authors, biography, Autores colombianos
