On February 28, 1955, the destroyer Caldas, traveling from the United States to Colombia, suffered an accident. In order to rescue the castaways, the US forces from the Panama Canal combed the area near the disaster. After four days of searching, no survivors were found and the search was called off. A week later, Luis Alejandro Velasco appeared; after spending ten days adrift in the Caribbean waters, he managed to reach land. With this book, Gabriel García Márquez discovered himself as a narrator. However, the initial intention was to write a report about a man who spent ten days adrift on a raft rocked by the Caribbean Sea. The future Nobel laureate in literature and then young reporter, García Márquez, heard the account of the events from the protagonist himself, and transformed it, perhaps unintentionally, into a prodigious literary exercise, a concise and vigorous narration where the pulse of a great writer beats.
The serialized publication of the report in
El Espectador of Bogotá caused considerable political uproar—it revealed the existence of illegal contraband on a Colombian Navy ship, which cost the lives of seven sailors and the more fortunate shipwreck of Velasco—and exile for its author, who was forced into a new life.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is a work of non-fiction by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The novel is about a shipwrecked sailor "Velasques" who struggles for ten days to reach the coast. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal.
Author: Gabriel García MárquezPublisher: Vintage Espanol
Published: 03/09/2010
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 8.12h x 5.28w x 0.53d
ISBN13: 9780307475381
ISBN10: 0307475387
Language: Spanish
BISAC Categories:-
Fiction |
LiteraryAbout the Author
Gabriel García Márquez, nacido en Colombia, fue una de las figuras más importantes e influyentes de la literatura universal. Ganador del Premio Nobel de Literatura, fue además cuentista, ensayista, crítico cinematográfico, autor de guiones y, sobre todo, intelectual comprometido con los grandes problemas de nuestro tiempo, en primer término con los que afectaban a su amada Colombia y a Hispanoamérica en general. Máxima figura del realismo mágico, fue en definitiva el hacedor de uno de los mundos narrativos más densos de significados que ha dado la lengua española en el siglo xx. Entre sus obras más importantes se encuentran las novelas Cien años de soledad, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, Crónica de una muerte anunciada, La mala hora, El general en su laberinto, El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Memoria de mis putas tristes, el libro de relatos Doce cuentos peregrinos, la primera parte de su autobiografía, Vivir para contarla, y sus discursos reunidos, Yo no vengo a decir un discurso. Falleció en 2014.
