one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcía

(Carlos Fuentes, Vernon Jordan, and Harvey Weinstein were at the table.) When García Márquez died, in April 2014, Barack Obama joined Clinton in mourning him, calling him “one of my favorites from the time I was young” and mentioning his cherished, inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Bill Clinton, during his first term as president, made it known that he would like to meet Gabo when they were both on Martha’s Vineyard they wound up swapping insights about Faulkner over dinner at Bill and Rose Styron’s place. A scene in the movie Chinatown takes place at a Hollywood hacienda dubbed El Macondo Apartments. Unofficially, it’s everybody’s favorite work of world literature and the novel that, more than any other since World War II, has inspired novelists of our time-from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Junot Díaz. 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. 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. 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.

The novel came off the press in Buenos Aires on May 30, 1967, two days before Sgt. Gabriel García Márquez began writing Cien Años de Soledad-One Hundred Years of Solitude-a half-century ago, finishing in late 1966. Month by month the typescript grew, presaging the weight that the great novel and the “solitude of fame,” as he would later put it, would inflict on him. “In my dreams, I was inventing literature,” he recalled.

He led his people on the long march through civil war and colonialism and banana-republicanism he trailed them into their bedrooms and witnessed sexual adventures obscene and incestuous. He visited a plague of insomnia upon the people of Macondo he made a priest levitate, powered by hot chocolate he sent down a swarm of yellow butterflies. Outside, it was the 1960s inside, it was the deep time of the pre-modern Americas, and the author at his typewriter was all-powerful. Stuck up on the wall were charts of the history of a Caribbean town he called Macondo and the genealogy of the family he named the Buendías. LPs were on the record player: Debussy, Bartók, A Hard Day’s Night. Cigarettes (he smoked 60 a day) were on the worktable.

The house, in a quiet part of Mexico City, had a study within, and in the study he found a solitude he had never known before and would never know again.

One hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcía