What, finally, of the self-portrait that emerges from this memoir? It is curiously glancing. García Márquez provides us with a thorough account of the development of his literary vocation, from school days to his mid-20s, and many a captivating incident or enthralling encounter in his journey to maturity. But what he was like as a boy or a young man is not so clear. The self-confidence his grandfather gave him as a child seems never to have left him, save for the briefest of adolescent turbulences. But there is little sign of deliberate ambition. He dwells on his shyness, but he was obviously lively company, since he was never short of friends. But how far he sought them, or whether they saw him as other than a madcap bohemian, is not revealed. In transactions with the opposite sex, seductions came mostly from women rather than himself. Though he says that when he returned to Barranquilla, "I had the timidity of a quail, which I tried to counteract with insufferable arrogance and brutal frankness," he seems to have been on generally good terms with his elders and peers, in one setting after another. No major quarrel marks this progress. Only occasionally does he allude to other, more volcanic sides to his personality--"fits of rage for any reason at all," "puerile tantrums"--but these hints are not enlarged upon.

Rather than any sustained self-analysis, García Márquez extends a generous mirror to his contemporaries. Living to Tell the Tale contains a teeming gallery of relatives, paramours, classmates, mentors and confederates, captured in a paragraph or a page or two. This is enough to make Anglo-Saxon readers impatient, but it is an attractive loyalty, which sets these memoirs apart from Vargas Llosa's. A Fish in the Water, aimed at an international public from the start, is here much thinner. García Márquez's memoirs are aimed at Colombian readers first of all.

They announce their principle of construction at the outset, in the manifesto set like an epigraph at the head of the book: "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." Taken literally, this is an invitation to selective recall, with all the facilities of a convenient amnesia. There is no reason to suppose García Márquez has abused his maxim. Yet it remains legitimate to ask how far memories correspond to facts. However much license we are willing to grant an artist in reconstructing the past, we would not value the result in the same way if it all proved imaginary.

In this case, the narrative allows for some question marks in the margin. Sex, politics, literature: Each leaves a penumbra of uncertainty around the edges. Commenting on his father's "furtive hunter's ways," García Márquez mentions that there was a period when he was tempted to imitate him, but soon discovered this was "the most arid form of solitude." Nothing in his account relates to this brief avowal. In The Fragrance of Guava he says he belonged to a cell of the Colombian Communist Party when he was at university in Bogotá. There is no trace of this in Living to Tell the Tale. Of authors who shaped him, he emphasizes Faulkner. But his rule that "each sentence ought to be responsible for the entire structure," and the celestial use of the adjective (he reports his aversion to adverbs) that is the signature of his prose, derive from Borges, whom he barely mentions. His abandonment of the Barranquilla group that produced the literary journal Crónica, the crucible of his first flourishing as a writer, is presented as an amicable parting, without trouble or resentment. Yet it slips out of the sleeve that he had resigned as editor in a fury some time before, for reasons unspecified. It looks as if the break might have been more painful than he suggests.

Do such discrepancies matter? The epigraph absolves them. But a life and a tale are never the same thing, and the interstices--wider or narrower--between them are inescapably part of the interest of each.

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