Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the 20th century’s most enduring works.
This is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the Colombian town they have built. Marquez offers readers literature on the grandest of scales. He is famously associated with the term ‘magical realism’ because of the way he weaves magic into the mundanities of real life, with this novel being the epitome of that.
Because of what he achieved with One Hundred Years of Solitude and thereafter, Marquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature. However, this book was almost never written. Vanity Fair‘s Paul Elie interviewed his longtime agent Carmen Balcells who shared the story of how she came to work with “the magnificent presence of the artist” that was Marquez.
“When Balcells and Luis arrived in Mexico City, in July 1965, García Márquez met not just his new agent but two people who were intimate with his work. In the daytime, he showed them the city; nights, they all had supper together with local writers. They ate and drank, and ate and drank some more. And then García Márquez, having fully warmed to his guests, took out a sheet of paper, and with Luis as a witness he and Balcells drew up a contract declaring her his representative in all the world for the next 150 years,” Elie writes.
Read the fascinating article for rare insight to one of the greatest writers ever to have lived:
Gabriel García Márquez began writing Cien Años de Soledad—One Hundred Years of Solitude—a half-century ago, finishing in late 1966. The novel came off the press in Buenos Aires on May 30, 1967, two days before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and the response among Spanish-language readers was akin to Beatlemania: crowds, cameras, exclamation points, a sense of a new era beginning. In 1970 the book appeared in English, followed by a paperback edition with a burning sun on its cover, which became a totem of the decade. By the time García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1982, the novel was considered the Don Quixote of the Global South, proof of Latin-American literary prowess, and the author was “Gabo,” known all over the continent by a single name, like his Cuban friend Fidel.
Many years later, interest in Gabo and his great novel is surging. The Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas, recently paid $2.2 million to acquire his archives—including a Spanish typescript of Cien Años de Soledad—and in October a gathering of his family members and academics took a fresh look at his legacy, repeatedly invoking the book as his magnum opus.
Read an excerpt from One Hundred Years of Solitude:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons. ‘Things have a life of their own,’ the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent.
For an alternative kind of breakdown of this epic novel, watch the Thug Notes Summary and Analysis:
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- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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EAN: 9780141032436
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