[Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo...]
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) celebrates its 40th birthday this year. This is also the author's 80th birthday, and the 25th anniversary of his Nobel Prize for Literature. Maybe it's the coincidence of numbers, but Gabo, as García Márquez is known among friends, has never been so popular. Celebrations are occurring in his native Colombia and elsewhere in the Hispanic world. And an inexpensive anniversary edition of his epic novel, overseen by the author and published under the aegis of the Real Academia Española, with a first printing of a million, is on sale throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
García Márquez's fame is nothing new. It came almost overnight, in 1967, with the hoopla surrounding the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana. The novel was translated into three dozen languages, and for a while, almost everyone on the globe seemed to be reading it. But with a population of more than 450 million, the Spanish-speaking world is larger and more complex today. No other of its artists has since come even close in reputation.
Before One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez was respected as a journalist and the author of a handful of books, including No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba), about a poor, forgotten army officer and his wife in a tropical town. As he anxiously awaits his military pension, the officer considers selling a rooster whose value in cockfights might be the family's only ticket to redemption. Already in that book and in García Márquez's stories, there were references to Macondo, the fictional setting of the novel that would make him famous. After 1967, at mid-career, it didn't seem possible García Márquez could supersede himself. He went on to write an admirable shelf of novels, from Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del Cólera) to Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores (Memoria de mis putas tristes). They might be more measured, maybe even more mature, but when it comes to depth, all of them pale in comparison to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The legend behind its composition holds that Gabo and his wife, Mercedes, living in Mexico in the mid-60s, were on their way in their Volkswagen to a vacation in Acapulco when the writer was struck by inspiration. They turned around, and in subsequent months García Márquez went into hiding. Borrowing money, Mercedes became his guardian angel, bringing him food, keeping away strangers. A handful of chapters began circulating among friends, among them the writers Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes, who publicly referred to what they read as a tour de force.
Ours is the age of mediated kitsch. A single episode of a Mexican telenovela today is watched by far more people than all the readers of García Márquez's novel, maybe of his entire oeuvre. But like the firefly, the soap opera perishes almost the second it stirs up its audience's passion. One Hundred Years of Solitude is imperishable. True, when read closely, as I've been doing this semester with my students, it's clearly first and foremost a melodrama, albeit a magisterial one, with syrupy scenes of unrequited love, sibling animosity, and domestic back stabbing.
But the signature mix of exoticism, magic, and the grotesque that García Márquez employs doesn't come from the world of soap operas. Known as "magical realism" — a category loosely connected to what the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier called "lo real maravilloso" — the term has achieved such ubiquity and elasticity as to become meaningless. For a while it denoted an attempt to erase the border between fact and fiction, between the natural and the supernatural. But its current use is chaotic. It helps in cataloging García Márquez's second-rate successors, like Isabel Allende, as it does in understanding Salman Rushdie's baroque hodgepodge of dreams and nationalism in Midnight's Children and Toni Morrison's phantasmagoric meditation on slavery in Beloved. All have been linked to "magical realism," with various degrees of success.
García Márquez, however, is its acknowledged fountainhead, and for good reason. At the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo is a small, nondescript town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia (modeled after García Márquez's birthplace, Aracataca which, 40 years after the novel's debut, is still a dusty place without running water). In 20 symmetrical chapters, each made of approximately 20 dense pages, a third-person narrator — is it Melquíades the Gypsy? — chronicles, with frightening precision, the town's rise and fall, exploring its geographical, temporal, ideological, and cultural dimensions. In spite of the title, the narrative time spans more than a century.
The genealogy of the main characters, the Buendía family, contains dozens of archetypal figures, surrounded by a cast of thousands. The need to belong shapes each of the Buendías and their entourage. There's an epidemic of insomnia, a rainstorm of small yellow flowers, a woman who eats earth, a clairvoyant, and a character obsessed with photographing God. The novel's matriarch is Úrsula Iguarán, a patient, down-to-earth woman, the closest one gets in Macondo to Mother Nature, who keeps the family afloat during almost a century. Afloat but not together: Úrsula's progeny don't know how to love healthily. Indeed, the novel's central motif is incest.
All that is narrated in a flamboyant style but with equanimity, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. García Márquez himself shows up in the latter part, and he makes coded references to his friends and colleagues. It might all be a joke, the reader finds himself thinking as the novel reaches its climactic conclusion.
Or is it? Fortunately, One Hundred Years of Solitude hasn't been turned into a film, a process that usually ends up diminishing the value of the literary source. In an op-ed, García Márquez wrote that Francis Ford Coppola offered to buy the rights to a cinematic adaptation. García Márquez declined, among other reasons, because he wanted Macondo not to be imprisoned in our imagination in the form of a set cast. (Some of his other novellas and stories, like Eréndira and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada), have made it to the big screen, with atrocious results.)
In 2002, García Márquez published the first installment of his autobiography: Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir para contarla). It contains keys — García Márquez's own home in Aracataca as the model for the Buendía house, he and his friends as the inspiration for the Barranquilla literary cadre in the latter part of the novel, a famous massacre of workers in 1928 that finds its way into the book — to deciphering the origin of his images and motifs. But should one be looking for such explanations in a novel that begs to be read autonomously, as a door to a parallel reality? My suggestion is to leave biography outside. Take the case of García Márquez's politics, which to scores of readers, especially Cuban exiles, are troubling. Since he was young, García Márquez has been a leftist. In the 60s, he followed the intellectual wave and embraced the Cuban revolution. But when many supporters switched sides, denouncing Fidel Castro's regime not only as intolerant but hypocritical, García Márquez did not. He remains a loyal friend to Havana, even serving occasionally as a broker in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.
A few critics would like to turn the commemoration of García Márquez's achievements this year into a referendum on his ideology. The same question was raised in 2004, when Pablo Neruda's centennial gave place to accusations that he had written not poetry but propaganda. It doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that in Latin America, the crossroads of literature and politics is particularly messy. Jorge Luis Borges received a medal from Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Mario Vargas Llosa was a presidential candidate in Peru in 1990, on a center-right platform. It's impossible to disentangle these forces. It is precisely that messiness that makes One Hundred Years of Solitude so compelling as it addresses the obstacles Latin America has encountered on its road to democracy.
My own relationship with the book has changed over time. I first read it in my teens and was transformed. It was the late 70s, and García Márquez's impact was being hailed: He had reinvented Latin America through his pen, infusing the region with magnetism. He had rejuvenated the novel, which after World War II seemed to have reached a dead end of insurmountable depression, helping move its center to the New World.
As I matured, I remained in awe of García Márquez but didn't want to feel stifled under his shadow. Many writers of my generation, the so-called Latin American literary boom, were from urban centers and didn't empathize with his worldview. We wanted to write not about, or from, the tropics, but about anything and everything — as Jorge Volpi has done on Nazism and the making of the atomic bomb in In Search of Klingsor, Rodrigo Fresán on Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Edmundo Paz Soldán on antiglobalization in Turing's Delirium, and Ignacio Padilla on the Austro-Hungarian empire's eastern front in Shadow Without a Name. For many of us, One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed too parochial. The novel as a literary genre needed to be feisty, oppositional, and unsanctimonious.
In my 40s, I've returned to García Márquez's masterpiece. Now it seems to me that, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It's a "total" novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours. One Hundred Years of Solitude has done something astonishing: It has survived, accumulating disparate, at times conflicting, rereadings. Isn't that what a classic is, a mirror in which readers see what they are looking for?
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