brianrayfiction.com Blog

So with the opening of a recent NY Times article go my hopes of reading the rest of Marquez’s memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale, which last I hard was supposed to come out in three volumes. I remember reading the first one almost straight through and reviewing it for the Free Times my last year in college. Marquez’s books are what you wish you’d written yourself but know you would’ve screwed up. Unfortunately, looks like his memory has started to erode and he can’t remember key parts of his own life without deferring to his official biographer (or maybe he was cracking a joke and the reporter didn’t catch it). Anyway, another book falls onto my wish list. I’m so glad this guy decided to condense his research into roughly 500 pages, because:

This intensive, assured, penetratingly analytical book will be the authoritative English-language study of Mr. García Márquez until Mr. Martin can complete an already 2,000-page, 6,000-footnote version “in a few more years, if life is kind.” He compressed that sprawling magnum opus into 545 pages (plus notes and index), a “brief, relatively compact narrative,” so it could be published “while the subject of this work, now a man past 80, is still alive and in a position to read it.” Both author and subject have been treated for lymphoma, Mr. Martin says.

It happens that I’m working on a 2,000-page biography of Chuck Norris. Other than Marquez, he might qualify as the only person worthy of so many pages. Did you know that Apple pays Chuck Norris 99 cents every time he listens to a song? Did you know that Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird? Did you know that Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because he only knows the element of surprise? Did you know that Chuck Norris wears a live rattlesnake as a condom? Well, that’s why I’m writing the biography.