One April day in 1950 the 22-year-old writer, eaten up with nerves, offers the rough typescript of his first novel to the old Catalan dramatist, Don Ramón Vinyes, leading spirit of their bohemian group. Putting on his spectacles, Don Ramón smooths the pages out on the café table and reads, without any variation in his expression, the opening section of what would become Leaf Storm. Then, replacing his spectacles in their case, and the case in his breast pocket, he makes a few comments on the novelist's handling of time – which was, as García Márquez admits here, ‘my life-or-death problem’; without doubt, the ‘most difficult of all’.

Resolving the Problem of Time

This portrait of the artist as a young man is no late, lazy memoir but a literary work in its own right, which recounts – or recreates – the process of García Márquez's formation as a writer within a highly wrought temporal framework. Living to Tell the Tale opens two months earlier, in medias res, as the author's mother, in mourning garb, threads her way lightly between the tables of the Mundo bookshop in Barranquilla, a stone's throw from Don Ramón's café, to confront her errant son with a mischievous smile: ‘before I could react she said, “I’m your mother.” And next, in her customary, ceremonial way: “I’ve come to ask you to please go with me to sell the house” ‘(Living to Tell the Tale, p. 3).

From here, time will double forward and back. The slow journey towards the old family home in Aracataca opens up vistas on to the past: