A farewell to Gabo and Mercedes A son's memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha

Review by Booklist Review

When the child of a globally recognized literary giant publishes a memoir, the pressure of inevitable comparison must be immense. And yet Garcia, the son of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, has chosen to focus on the waning years of his parents' lives, when the immediate glare of the spotlights had long passed. This allows Garcia to write candidly about an incredibly painful time, as his father slipped into dementia and eventual hospitalization. The result is an intensely personal reflection on his father's legacy and his family bonds, tender in its treatment and stirring in its brevity. Composed in short chapters of concise, honest prose, Garcia's book pulls back the curtain to provide a view denied to journalists, photographers, and even the doctors and nurses who crowded his father's hospital quarters, eager to get a peek at the dying star. Perhaps Garcia's experiences as a television and film producer helped him frame each sequence with a cinematic lens, as it seems every remembrance is rendered with uniquely exacting energy, such as when his father no longer recognizes his sons, or how on the flight back from his father's funeral, he sees a fellow passenger reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. An intimate portrait of immense loss.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The Nobel-winning author of the celebrated One Hundred Years of Solitude and his wife, Mercedes, are memorialized in this heartfelt debut written by their son. Garcia recounts Gabriel Garcia Marquez's last days in 2014 as he fought cancer and dementia in his Mexico City home with Mercedes, his "last tether," beside him. Even as his father's ability to recognize family members and prodigious mental faculties faded--while crowds of admirers and journalists surrounded the house--he spoke "with a deliberateness that makes you forget... that he is years deep into dementia." Throughout, flashes of Garcia Marquez's personality and earthy sense of humor pierce through ("Everyone treats me like I'm a child," he remarks one day. "It's good that I like it"). Garcia's limpid prose gazes calmly at death, registering pain but not being overcome by it, as he documents his mother's matter-of-fact pragmatism and the deep emotion hidden beneath it: "She looks my father up and down with detachment as if he were her patient... she is unfathomable. Then a brief convulsion overcomes her, and she erupts into tears." The result is a moving eulogy that will captivate fans of the literary lion. Agent: Maribel Luque, Agencia Balcells. (July)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An account of the days of a remarkable couple. In a slender, affectionate memoir, film director and screenwriter Garcia pays tribute to his father, Nobel Prize--winning author Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), and his mother, Mercedes Barcha, who died in 2020. His father's life, Garcia reflects, seemed to him "one of the most fortunate and privileged" ever enjoyed by a Latin American. Yet Garcia was impelled to make "a deliberate, if unconscious choice" to distance himself from his father's fame by living and working in Los Angeles. He traveled frequently to Mexico during his father's final years, when García Márquez descended into dementia, able to recall only those whom he saw daily--a secretary, driver, cook, and, of course, his beloved wife. When Garcia and his brother visited, he looked at them "with uninhibited curiosity" but no recognition. The man they were speaking to, though welcoming, was "hardly there at all." However, his death, while expected, still felt like a shock. "Beyond the sadness," Garcia writes, "is the disbelief that such an exuberant, expansive man, forever intoxicated with life and with the travails of the living, has been extinguished." When his mother died six years later, the sense of loss was compounded. "The death of the second parent is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that has always been there," he writes. "It has vanished, with its religion, its customs, its own peculiar habits and rituals, big and small. The echo remains." Although his parents were determined to keep their personal lives private from inquiring journalists and literary fans, Garcia recounts in sensitive detail his father's last days. "My father," he writes, "complained that one of the things he hated most about death was that it was the only aspect of his life he would not be able to write about." His son sensitively completes the story, and he includes family photos. A warm homage filled with both fond and painful memories. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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