“Solitude & Company” isn’t meant to replace Gerald Martin’s authoritative 2009 biography of García Márquez. It’s a book that gathers his old friends together, as if around a table, and lets them talk. Few can believe what a big deal their old drinking buddy Gabo turned out to be, how he floated away from them on a nimbus of success. They aren’t quite willing to cast palm fronds in front of him just yet.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

García Márquez wrote some of his early fiction on rolls of newsprint that he liberated from his day jobs. Perhaps this accounts, in some small way, for the manner with which his fiction and nonfiction can seem to bleed together.

The articles and columns in “The Scandal of the Century” demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start. (Irony was the fan that reliably cooled the intense projector of García Márquez’s mind.)

He wrote his journalism, he said, with “the same conscience, the same joy and often the same inspiration with which I should have written a masterpiece.” The sprinter and the long-distance runner in him were oddly in sync. He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding; he didn’t know how to phone anything in.

He was a world-class observer. Watching President Dwight D. Eisenhower disembark from a plane in Paris in 1958, he noted not just his “wide smile of a good sport” but, better, “his long and sure Johnnie Walker strides.”

Airplanes figure often in García Márquez’s journalism. He hated to fly. About air travel after he became famous, he wrote: “I always fly so frightened that I don’t even notice how anyone treats me, and all my energy goes into gripping my seat with my hands to hold it up in order to help the plane stay up in the air, or trying to keep children from running in the aisles for fear they’ll break through the floor.”

He dilated on writers and their economic hardships. Take cigarettes, for example. “The best writers are the ones who tend to write less and smoke more,” he proclaimed, “and so it’s normal that they need at least two years and 29,000 cigarettes to write a book of 200 pages. What that means in good arithmetic is that just on what they smoke they spend more than what they’ll earn from the book.”