Colombia is one of the many Spanish-speaking countries where readers embraced Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon. The book appeared on best-seller lists, and El Heraldo, in Barranquilla—the newspaper where Gabriel García Márquez once worked as a reporter and columnist—ran an excerpt as the cover story in their Sunday magazine supplement.
This was back in the mid-2000s, but Colombia's fascination with Nowhere Man continues. The other week, the book came to the attention of a columnist at the first newspaper to publish Márquez, El Espectador, in Bogotá. (I keep mentioning Márquez because the Venezuelan newspaper Últimas Noticias listed Nowhere Man as one of "Five Indispensable Books" along with Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.) Novelist and poet Luis Fernando Charry's May 4 column is titled "Los últimos días de Lennon ." (You can also access it on MSN.)
He starts out talking about the multitude of Lennon biographies and memoirs, including books by Albert Goldman, Philip Norman, Cynthia Lennon, May Pang, and John Green. This is a setup for his impressions of Nowhere Man. I wouldn't agree with all of Charry's interpretations. I don't know why, for example, he finds Lennon's yoga sessions "disturbing" or why he implies that Yoko Ono was a student of yoga (she wasn't). But he does a good job of making the book sound interesting, describing such things as Lennon's paradoxical diet that wavered between health food and sweets; his obsession with his weight; the "miracle" of his son Sean's birth; and how fatherhood had an adverse effect on his career. This being Latin America, he also mentions that the New York Daily News mistakenly reported that Ono worked for the CIA. And he ends, of course, on how Mark David Chapman put an end to the legend.
I'll count it as a positive review.
Which brings us to the perennial question: Why has Nowhere Man endured for 24 years? The short answer: Because people keep reading it and writing about it. I hope they continue.
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