In the public mind, what probably distinguishes the two writers most are conventional images of their politics--García Márquez, friend of Fidel; Vargas Llosa, devotee of Thatcher: figures respectively of an ecumenical left and a neoliberal right. That polarity exists, of course. But if one looks at the writing, rather than the affiliations, another contrast is more striking. Vargas Llosa was from the beginning, and has remained, a political animal. As a student in Lima under the Odría dictatorship, he was an active Communist militant, inducted into the party by Héctor Béjar, who would lead the first Peruvian guerrilla movement in the 1960s; and after arriving in Europe, he steeped himself in Marxist theory as an enthusiast for the Cuban Revolution. When he broke with the left over Cuba in the early 1970s, he did not simply retreat into literature, as did others, but became a passionate admirer of Hayek and Friedman, and a leading advocate of free-market capitalism in Latin America. His run for the presidency of Peru, with the support of the traditional right, was not a sudden caprice but the outcome of a decade of consistent public activity. Logically, his fiction--from his earliest depiction of the military academy in The Time of the Hero through the revolutionary conspiracies of Conversation in the Cathedral or The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta to the recent The Feast of the Goat--takes contemporary political conflicts directly as an organizing theme.

This has never been the case with García Márquez, and Living to Tell the Tale helps to explain why, though patches of mystery remain. He depicts a youngster, coming from the coast to the highlands in his teens, so absorbed in literary matters--at first poetry, above all--as to have virtually no interest in public affairs. Colombia was already in a state of high political tension in his last school years, and just as he arrived at university, the country descended into civil war. The single most powerful chapter of Living to Tell the Tale contains a Goyaesque panorama of the social earthquake that engulfed Bogotá when Gaitán, its most popular politician, was murdered in 1948. From his pensíon three blocks away, García Márquez rushed to the scene, arriving to witness the lynching of the assassin and the outbreak of the tidal wave of rioting and looting that swept the city. But his reaction, as he records it, was simply to go back to the boardinghouse to finish his lunch. Meeting him on the street, an older relative--who became one of the leaders of the revolutionary junta that tried to steer the turmoil into an uprising against the Conservative government--urged him to participate in the student protests against the murder. In vain. Terrified by the wholesale destruction and killings of the next days, when the army moved into the city to restore order, his one desire was to escape.

The Violencia, which ravaged Colombia for the next decade, pitting Liberals against the ruling Conservatives, took 300,000 lives--a catastrophe worse than any endured in Peru. This was the historical background to García Márquez's early career as a journalist and writer. But he seems to have remained eerily untouched by it. Although a regular columnist for a Cartagena daily, he writes that "in my political obfuscation at the time, I did not even know that martial law had been reimposed in the country." In Barranquilla, a little later, "the truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached me like a remote echo and moved me only when it spilled over into rivers of blood." The confession is disarming but the distinction untenable: Colombia's drama was the spilling of rivers of blood. The reality seems to have been that in these years the young littérateur, entirely wrapped up in discoveries and experiments of the imagination, effectively ignored the fate of his country.

This was easier to do in the coastal cities, since the Caribbean littoral, although not immune to sectarian killing, was spared the worst of the Violencia raging along the coffee frontiers of the highlands. García Márquez's identification with his region--"the only place where I really feel at home''--has given his writing its luminous intensity, but also seems to have shielded, or blinded, him from larger national patterns and forces. "Colombia," he writes, "had always been a country with a Caribbean identity that opened to the world by means of the umbilical cord of Panama. Its forced amputation condemned us to be what we are today: a nation with an Andean mentality whose circumstances favor the canal between the two oceans belonging not to us but to the United States."

The regret is palpable, and consequential. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the Andean uplands that form the core of Colombian society have remained something of a closed book to García Márquez. Hence in part, no doubt, the blankness of Living to Tell the Tale about the civil war within which its latter half unfolds. The novelist's one venture into contemporary history, News of a Kidnapping, humane and gripping though it is as the account of a closing episode in drug lord Pablo Escobar's career, confirms a certain intellectual mountain sickness. For it lacks either much sense of the social context of Colombia's drug wars or critical vision of the oligarchy presiding over them. Reading it, one might be tempted to think that at bottom García Márquez has remained as unpolitical as when he started out.

That would be a mistake, as the sequel to Living to Tell the Tale will certainly show. But both this memoir and his fiction suggest a mind with a marvelous intuitive sensibility for the temper, the color and the details of the world in which he grew up, without much thought for definition of its relationships or structures. From this account, it would be difficult to locate García Márquez's family with any accuracy in a social scale. His grandfather, though represented as a patriarch of some substance, appears to have been originally little more than an artisan, albeit a goldsmith: The economic basis of the legendary household in Aracataca--where his father sought the hand of the "daughter of a wealthy family"--remains obscure. The ups and downs in his father's fortunes, from extreme poverty to modest comfort--seemingly unrelated to the proliferation of fifteen offspring--are only a little less elusive. In due course, clan connections reveal themselves: an uncle in the Cartagena police, capable of dispensing jobs; a professor in Bogotá; the owner of a major bookstore. How all this fitted the young Gabito into a complicated hierarchy of class and color we are left to work out for ourselves.

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