What is the true story of a life? Gabriel García Márquez, the man who for many is the greatest living storyteller, has always understood that fantasy is a big part of the way we explain what happens to us. Up until now, though, García Márquez's hands have been firmly on the reins of his own stories. True, he introduced the anarchic concept of 'magic realism' with his novels Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude , but his surreal imagery just served to underline who was in charge.
In the past few weeks, however, a story has slipped away from the great man's control. An email has been circulating the English-speaking world which claims to contain his final words of farewell to his readers. A short letter accompanied by several plausible lines of lyrical verse has had García Márquez fans across the globe convinced that he was speaking to them for the last time.
'This is possibly, sadly, one of the last gifts to humanity from a true master,' the introductory note read, going on to claim that the 'truly moving' email had been sent out to the author's closest friends in its original Spanish.
It was already known that the Nobel Laureate had been ill for some months with cancer and that he was writing in private. The disease had first been diagnosed in July 1999 when he was admitted to hospital in his native Colombia, suffering from exhaustion. As a result, for many recipients the finality of the words in the email seemed apt and rather beautiful.
'If for an instant God were to forget that I am rag doll and gifted me with a piece of life,' it read, 'possibly I wouldn't say all that I think, but rather I would think of all that I say. I would value things, not for their worth but for what they mean. I would sleep little, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our eyes we lose 60 seconds of light.'
In a further effort to convince, the valedictory lines went on to mention a Latin American poet, Benedetti from Uruguay, and the popular Catalan singer, Serrat. It ended with the words: 'I have learnt that a man has the right to look down on another only when he has to help the other get to his feet. From you I have learnt so many things, but in truth they won't be of much use, for when I keep them within this suitcase, unhappily shall I be dying.'
The writer has now denied authorship of the email through his Spanish agent, but rumours of his ill-health have persisted. Why has he been closeted in his Mexican home for so long, and what can we expect to hear of him next?
The Observer can reveal that García Márquez has been writing the definitive work of his life - and it has much more of the intellectual flavour and dry humour of his previous work than the email. The new project is an autobiography and its theme is the way we mis-remember and re-tell our own stories. In it, using a liberal dose of hokum and his own brand of special effects, García Márquez sets out a version of his life for readers to remember him by.
'From what I have seen, this is going to be very funny and fascinating. But it should be taken with a pinch of salt,' said Michael Wood of Princeton University, the author of a book on Love in the Time of Cholera. 'It has all his usual exaggerations, and it should perhaps be viewed as a study of the way we all mythologise our family histories.'
The tricks that memory plays, the writer argues, actually shape our lives. 'What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it,' García Márquez writes at the opening of his personal account.
Further on he demonstrates the point with an anecdote. He says that when his parents were married in 1926, his mother yearned for the little telegraph office house where she had spent her honeymoon. García Márquez says he and his brothers and sisters were soon able to describe it 'room by room as if they had lived there'.
As he approached the age of 60, the writer finally travelled to the place to look at the house and found it 'was not at all like the one in my memory at all'. All the same, today he can 'never visualise it as it is, but rather as I constructed it, stone by stone, without seeing it, through my mother's nostalgia'.
The phoney farewell email, now thought to have been penned by an American prankster, does not stand up to comparison with these fresh passages from a master. 'Personally I was not convinced by the email, which people have been sending me for some while,' said Wood.
The real work of the 73-year-old author, as he draws towards the end of his life, is far more playful. Even the title of the new story, To Live So I Could Tell, gently teases the reader.
'This has at least three possible meanings,' says Wood. 'In one sense it means that he has survived and so he can tell; in another it means that he has lived only for telling stories. But, of course, it also means that he is now continuing to live simply to write this book.'
The work begins by telling the 'real' story that inspired Love in the Time of Cholera - the tale of how his socially unequal parents courted and eventually married.
'It tells the same tale, in a fanciful way again, but this time they don't have to wait for most of their lives before they can get together.'
All the dates and names in this autobiography seem to be correct, however, and García Márquez scholars can look forward to a factual record of the life of the author who befriended many statesmen, including Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, as well as winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
While the completed autobiography is likely to prove a more accurate historical document than the fake email that fooled so many, fans can rest assured that Marquez's own version of his life will still contain some bright red herrings.
His real words ... and the fake farewell:
From the genuine forthcoming autobiography
'What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.'
From the hoax email
'If for an instant God were to forget that I am rag doll and gifted me with a piece of life, possibly I wouldn't say all that I think, but rather I would think of all that I say. I would value things, not for their worth but for what they mean. I would sleep little, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our eyes we lose sixty seconds of light.
'I would walk when others hold back, I would wake when others sleep. I would listen when others talk, and how I would enjoy a good chocolate ice cream! If God were to give me a piece of life, I would dress simply, throw myself face first into the sun, baring not only my body but also my soul. My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show. Over the stars I would paint with a Van Gogh dream a Benedetti poem, and a Serrat song would be the serenade I'd offer to the moon.'