WHAT DO SHOES TASTE LIKE? BY GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

February 28, 1955, brought news that eight crew members of the destroyer Caldas, of the Colombian Navy, had fallen overboard and disappeared during a storm in the Caribbean Sea …

… A search for the seamen began immediately, with the cooperation of the U.S. Panama Canal Authority ..

… after four days, the search was abandoned and the lost sailors were officially declared dead. A week later, however, one of them turned up half dead on a deserted beach in northern Colombia, having survived ten days without food or water on a drifting life raft. His name was Luis Alejandro Velasco. This book is a journalistic reconstruction of what he told me, as it was published one month after the disaster in the Bogotá daily El Espectador.

Gabriel García Márquez
From: “Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.” 


April 28, 1955
Louis Alejandro Velasco's Odissey
Source: Z Block'15


“The relief I felt while chewing the cards spurred my imagination to look for things to eat. If I had had a knife, I would have cut up my shoes and chewed slices of the rubber soles. They were the closest thing at hand. I tried to pry off the clean, white soles with my keys. But I couldn’t pull off a piece of the sole, it was glued so tightly to the fabric.”


1953 | Denson
Source: HistoryWorld

“For using a certain brand of chewing gum and saying so in an ad, I received a thousand pesos. I was lucky that the manufacturer of my shoes gave me two thousand pesos for endorsing them in an ad. For permitting my story to be told on radio I received five thousand. I never imagined that surviving ten days of hunger and thirst would turn out to be so profitable. ”

Gabriel García Márquez
From: “Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.” (Knopf, 1986 - First published 1970)



SHOES & BOOKS
[FEAT. HEMINGWAY, SHAKESPEARE, SARAMAGO, RANKIN, GALEANO ...]



Gabriel García Márquez
Relato De Un Náufrago (Debolsillo, 2003 - First published 1970)


 

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