Lifestyle September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling 0 September Book Club Pick: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes 0 0000 0 0 more now viewing September Book Club Pick: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling now playing Transferring money from UAE abroad: what are my cheapest options September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling WIN With Nespresso This Mother’s Day September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling NBA Playoffs 2022: A Casual Fan's Guide to the Postseason September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling Best New Climbing Gear of 2022 September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling A Local Weekend Travel Guide to Austin, Texas September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling First Drive: 2022 Range Rover Ups the Luxury SUV Experience September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling Most Stylish Rain Jackets, Parkas, and Trench Coats for Men September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling EU eyes Russian oil import ban as Moscow strikes western Ukraine September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling World-class Clark Int’l Airport opens new 110,000 square-meter passenger terminal September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling PCG: Bodies of 5 children who drowned in Taal Lake found September 3, 2021 Under One Ceiling September Book Club Pick: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes September Book Club Pick: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes This month for goop Book Club, we’re reading Rodrigo Garcia’s memoir about growing up the son of the famous writer Gabriel García Márquez and the brilliant Mercedes Barcha. It’s surprising, absorbing, intimate, moving. Garcia’s account of García Márquez and Barcha’s extraordinary lives and partnership grabs ahold of you. But it’s his account of the ordinariness and the quiet of their final days (they died a few years apart, both at the age of eighty-seven) that will never leave you. What a stunning way to report on love. Read an excerpt below and then pick up a copy of the book, join us to discuss (on Facebook and Zoom), and save the date—September 30 at 5 p.m. PT—for a live chat with the author. Also: You can join us for book club this Thursday, September 2, at 5 p.m. PT for a conversation with Ashley Nelson Levy, the author of Immediate Family, our August pick. Rodrigo Garcia A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Bookshop, $22 SHOP NOW Join Goop Book Club From A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes I walk upstairs and look into my father’s room. The day nurse takes notes while the aide reads a magazine. My father is perfectly still, in something like sleep, but the room feels different from the rest of the house. For all the tranquility, time now seems to move faster here, like it’s in a rush, impatient to make time for more time. It’s disconcerting. Standing near the foot of the bed, I look at him, diminished as he is, and I feel like both his son (his little son) and his father. I am acutely aware that I have a unique overview of his eighty-seven years. The beginning, the middle, and the end are all there in front of me, unfolding like an accordion book. It’s a dizzying sensation to know the destiny of a human being. Of course, the years before I was born are a concoction of things told to me by him or his siblings or my mother, or recounted by relatives, friends, journalists, and biographers, and embellished by my own imagination: My father as a boy of six playing goalkeeper in a soccer game and feeling that he was playing very well, better than usual. A year or two later, looking at a solar eclipse without a proper glass and forever losing the sight at the center of his left eye. Watching from the door of his grandparents’ house as men walked by carrying the dead body of a man, and the wife walking behind them holding a child in one hand and the husband’s severed head in the other. Spitting into his fruit gelatin or eating plantain chips from his shoe to discourage his many brothers and sisters from poaching his food. In adolescence, a trip up the Magdalena River toward boarding school, feeling miserably alone. From his time in Paris, an afternoon he visited a woman and tried to extend the visit so as to be asked for dinner, since he was broke and hadn’t eaten in days. After that failed, rummaging through her garbage on the way out and eating out of it. (He told this to others in front of me when I was fifteen, and I felt as embarrassed as an adolescent can feel by their parent.) There was also in Paris a melancholy Chilean girl, Violeta Parra, that he occasionally ran into at get-togethers of Latin American expatriates. She wrote and sang beautiful, heart-wrenching songs and eventually took her own life. One afternoon in Mexico City in 1966, he walked up to the room where my mother read in bed and announced to her that he had just written the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. “I’ve killed the colonel,” he said to her, distraught. She knew what that meant to him, and they sat together in silence with the sad news. Even in the long period of great and rare literary acclaim, wealth, and access, there were ugly days, of course. The death of Álvaro Cepeda at forty-six from cancer, and the assassination of journalist Guillermo Cano by drug cartels at sixty-one. The deaths of two brothers (the youngest of sixteen siblings), the alienating aspect of celebrity, the loss of memory and the inability to write that came with it. He eventually reread his books in his old age, and it was like reading them for the first time. “Where on earth did all this come from?” he once asked me. He continued to read them until the end, eventually recognizing them as familiar books by the cover but understanding very little of their content. Sometimes, when closing a book, he would be surprised to find his photograph on the back cover, so he would reopen it and attempt to read it again. Standing there, at the foot of his bed, I’d like to think that his brain, despite the dementia (and perhaps aided by the morphine), is still the cauldron of creativity that it always was. Fractured, perhaps, unable to return to thoughts or to sustain story lines, but still active. His imagination was always prodigiously fertile. Six generations of the Buendía family make up One Hundred Years of Solitude, but he had enough material for two more generations. He decided not to include it for fear the novel would be too long and tiresome. He thought great discipline was one of the cornerstones of writing a novel, particularly when it came to framing the shape and limits of the tale. He disagreed with those who said it was a freer, and therefore easier, form than a screenplay or a short story. It was imperative, he argued, that the novelist draft his or her own rigorous road map in order to traverse what he referred to as “the treacherous terrain of a novel.” The journey from Aracataca in 1927 to this day in Mexico City in 2014 is about as long and extraordinary a journey as a person can have, and those dates on a tombstone could never begin to encompass it. From where I’m standing, it looks like one of the most fortunate and privileged lives ever lived by a Latin American. He’d be the first to agree. Excerpt from A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha by Rodrigo Garcia. Published by HarperVia. Copyright © 2021 HarperCollins. We hope you enjoy the book recommended here. Our goal is to suggest only things we love and think you might, as well. We also like transparency, so, full disclosure: We may collect a share of sales or other compensation if you purchase through the external links on this page. Related No related posts. 0000 0 0 previous Getting Naked and Finding Joy in Your Body next Looking for More Sleep and Energy?
September Book Club Pick: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes This month for goop Book Club, we’re reading Rodrigo Garcia’s memoir about growing up the son of the famous writer Gabriel García Márquez and the brilliant Mercedes Barcha. It’s surprising, absorbing, intimate, moving. Garcia’s account of García Márquez and Barcha’s extraordinary lives and partnership grabs ahold of you. But it’s his account of the ordinariness and the quiet of their final days (they died a few years apart, both at the age of eighty-seven) that will never leave you. What a stunning way to report on love. Read an excerpt below and then pick up a copy of the book, join us to discuss (on Facebook and Zoom), and save the date—September 30 at 5 p.m. PT—for a live chat with the author. Also: You can join us for book club this Thursday, September 2, at 5 p.m. PT for a conversation with Ashley Nelson Levy, the author of Immediate Family, our August pick. Rodrigo Garcia A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Bookshop, $22 SHOP NOW Join Goop Book Club From A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes I walk upstairs and look into my father’s room. The day nurse takes notes while the aide reads a magazine. My father is perfectly still, in something like sleep, but the room feels different from the rest of the house. For all the tranquility, time now seems to move faster here, like it’s in a rush, impatient to make time for more time. It’s disconcerting. Standing near the foot of the bed, I look at him, diminished as he is, and I feel like both his son (his little son) and his father. I am acutely aware that I have a unique overview of his eighty-seven years. The beginning, the middle, and the end are all there in front of me, unfolding like an accordion book. It’s a dizzying sensation to know the destiny of a human being. Of course, the years before I was born are a concoction of things told to me by him or his siblings or my mother, or recounted by relatives, friends, journalists, and biographers, and embellished by my own imagination: My father as a boy of six playing goalkeeper in a soccer game and feeling that he was playing very well, better than usual. A year or two later, looking at a solar eclipse without a proper glass and forever losing the sight at the center of his left eye. Watching from the door of his grandparents’ house as men walked by carrying the dead body of a man, and the wife walking behind them holding a child in one hand and the husband’s severed head in the other. Spitting into his fruit gelatin or eating plantain chips from his shoe to discourage his many brothers and sisters from poaching his food. In adolescence, a trip up the Magdalena River toward boarding school, feeling miserably alone. From his time in Paris, an afternoon he visited a woman and tried to extend the visit so as to be asked for dinner, since he was broke and hadn’t eaten in days. After that failed, rummaging through her garbage on the way out and eating out of it. (He told this to others in front of me when I was fifteen, and I felt as embarrassed as an adolescent can feel by their parent.) There was also in Paris a melancholy Chilean girl, Violeta Parra, that he occasionally ran into at get-togethers of Latin American expatriates. She wrote and sang beautiful, heart-wrenching songs and eventually took her own life. One afternoon in Mexico City in 1966, he walked up to the room where my mother read in bed and announced to her that he had just written the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. “I’ve killed the colonel,” he said to her, distraught. She knew what that meant to him, and they sat together in silence with the sad news. Even in the long period of great and rare literary acclaim, wealth, and access, there were ugly days, of course. The death of Álvaro Cepeda at forty-six from cancer, and the assassination of journalist Guillermo Cano by drug cartels at sixty-one. The deaths of two brothers (the youngest of sixteen siblings), the alienating aspect of celebrity, the loss of memory and the inability to write that came with it. He eventually reread his books in his old age, and it was like reading them for the first time. “Where on earth did all this come from?” he once asked me. He continued to read them until the end, eventually recognizing them as familiar books by the cover but understanding very little of their content. Sometimes, when closing a book, he would be surprised to find his photograph on the back cover, so he would reopen it and attempt to read it again. Standing there, at the foot of his bed, I’d like to think that his brain, despite the dementia (and perhaps aided by the morphine), is still the cauldron of creativity that it always was. Fractured, perhaps, unable to return to thoughts or to sustain story lines, but still active. His imagination was always prodigiously fertile. Six generations of the Buendía family make up One Hundred Years of Solitude, but he had enough material for two more generations. He decided not to include it for fear the novel would be too long and tiresome. He thought great discipline was one of the cornerstones of writing a novel, particularly when it came to framing the shape and limits of the tale. He disagreed with those who said it was a freer, and therefore easier, form than a screenplay or a short story. It was imperative, he argued, that the novelist draft his or her own rigorous road map in order to traverse what he referred to as “the treacherous terrain of a novel.” The journey from Aracataca in 1927 to this day in Mexico City in 2014 is about as long and extraordinary a journey as a person can have, and those dates on a tombstone could never begin to encompass it. From where I’m standing, it looks like one of the most fortunate and privileged lives ever lived by a Latin American. He’d be the first to agree. Excerpt from A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha by Rodrigo Garcia. Published by HarperVia. Copyright © 2021 HarperCollins. We hope you enjoy the book recommended here. Our goal is to suggest only things we love and think you might, as well. We also like transparency, so, full disclosure: We may collect a share of sales or other compensation if you purchase through the external links on this page.
