Gabriel García Márquez

“García Márquez, a formidable journalist as well as a great writer, writes all about that political environment with precision and a brutal handling of small details, while also becoming a witness to an impossible world.” (Guillermo Altares, El País)

“With that torrential, direct and beautiful style that characterises his prose, and the wit of a restless journalist, García Márquez pours his impressions into a book that reads as if the reader were the one accompanying the writer.” (Natalio Blanco, Esquire)

“A dazzling account in which admiration for socialism mixes with criticism of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and the capture of a climate of incipient absurdity.” (Martín Pérez, Página 12)

 

De viaje por Europa del Este is a first-hand account of young García Márquez’s journey through the Socialist Bloc countries in the 1950s, right after Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Along with comments from his travelling companions, its pages contain a keen analysis, not without irony, of the social and political developments of that period. This journey of contrasts starts in East Berlin and continues through Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary all the way to Moscow. With the author’s unsurpassed lucidity, it provides a nuanced account of everyday life in a system with an expiration date, where every detail reveals the ambivalent face of true socialism.

 

Written and published in instalments during the same period as his legendary The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, this work is another priceless example of Gabo’s narrative mastery. It reveals his deepest vocation and hallmark: the pleasure of telling a good story.