Book: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Author: Gabriel García Márquez

Genre: Novels / Fiction and Literature / Latin American Literature / Latin American Classics

Publishing Year: 1982

Language: English / Original Language: Spanish

Original Title: Relato de un Náufrago

Description:

«The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft 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» is the full title of this novelized report written by a then young journalist Gabriel García Márquez.

The story arose when Luis Alejandro Velasco, the only survivor of the destroyer Caldas that sank in the Caribbean Sea, showed up at the offices of the editorial office of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, the workplace of the future Nobel Prize winner.

Velasco's intention was to tell the true story of the events, hidden and distorted by the dictatorship in power that had tried to show him as a kind of hero.

It was thus that after many sessions listening to the detailed account of the protagonist, the journalist developed the new version of the story that was divided into episodes and published on fourteen consecutive days. Such was the repercussion that a week later, in a special supplement, it was republished in full and with photos that supported its veracity.

The future author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" never imagined that what began as the reconstruction of an almost adventure story of a castaway who survived ten days adrift, would reveal truths that would make the government uncomfortable and would lead shortly after to the closure of the newspaper and his own exile.