I’m Not Here to Give a Speech

Though the late Nobel laureate García Márquez (1927–2014) professed discomfort with public speaking, as the title indicates, this collection demonstrates that he was still a powerful storyteller with the spoken as well as printed word. The talks are arranged chronologically, from a farewell address in praise of friendship he gave at age 17 in 1944 to his classmates at the National Secondary School for Boys in Zipaquirá, Colombia, to a 2007 speech on writing One Hundred Years of Solitude to Real Academia Española and the king and queen of Spain. In the latter, he marvels at the millions of readers the book has touched, not to boast but “to show that there are a number of human beings who have demonstrated with their habit of reading that their souls are open to be filled with messages in Spanish.” Perhaps the most notable selection is his 1982 speech accepting the Nobel Prize, “The Solitude of Latin America,” which counsels Europeans “with an enlightening spirit” to realize that expressing solidarity with Latin Americans’ “dreams will not make us feel less alone” unless accompanied by concrete action. These talks, so eloquently rendered by García Márquez’s longtime translator Grossman, capture the novelist’s passion, genius, and energetic way of telling a story with a clear moral. (Jan.)