The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Often when a writer travels, interviews and by life gets to a know a lot of people, he/she goes through much trouble to unearth privacy, stories that don't really belong to them. Yet again, that is the job of writer, mainly a journalist - making another's story a creation of their own intellect. The triumph to stay alive, the implications of heroism, the social set up of Columbia under the military and social dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, run a seam across the story-line of "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The narrative stands alone to talk about the wavy depth of the story telling talents both that the protagonist and Marquez have acquired through the years. This book, particularly, is a different and unique publication by Marquez. It is a typical journalistic reconstruction, like many of his other creations like "Of Love and Other Demons," but these pages are thoroughly filled with the view Luis Alejandro Velasco.

Marquez, the famous magical realist, with in-depth understanding of realism needed for courageous jounalism, reconstructs a narrative, publishes it, but warns us that he was pretty much persuaded to lay it on the shelves for sale.

The most intriguing aspect of this author is that he will never fail to tell you from which incident and from what understanding of realism, did the narrative bloom.Nothing puts his magic in words, other than his own, where he writes an abstract for this 'reconstruction' - "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor who drifted on a life raft for ten days without food or water, was proclaimed a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, made rich through publicity, and then spurned by the government and forgotten for all time."

Marquez has a passion for magic, and writes poetic prose. Much noteworthy claim goes to the translators of his writing. This book has been translated from Spanish by Randolph Hogan. The translator needs credit for keeping alive a writer in a different language, a different system, with the same magic.Penguin Publishers sell this book globally, at reasonable rates. In India, one can get a legal copy for Rs. 170.