Literally, "vivir para contarla" means "live to tell the story."
Literary-ily, it is the title of Colombian literary hero Gabriel Garcia Marquez's autobiography. The autobiography, was of course, not his piece de resistance. That was One Hundred Years of Solitude, his novel that won the Nobel Prize.
Marquez derived inspiration from his surroundings, namely from events in his own life, and those throughout the history of Colombia. To quote Wikipedia, “the novel compresses several centuries of Latin American history into a manageable text.”
While this blog pretends to be nothing of Nobel-Prize winning quality, nor to compress seven hundred years of Colombian history into your computer screen, it will operate on, what I am assuming, were some of Marquez’s assumptions when he wrote Cien Anos.
1. Our own lives are full of stories worth telling.
2. We can learn about history and culture through the stories of ordinary folks.
3. Reality and fiction can be interwoven. (a.k.a magical realism.)
4. Colombian history and culture are worth knowing about.
