one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcía

The saga of Macondo and the Buendía family immediately became a modern classic, often compared to the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare. What came after has been recounted ad nauseam. García Márquez knew he had a great story, but he just couldn’t find the right path for the epic novel he had in mind. His previous books had been highly praised yet a commercial failure. But the family struggled to survive on his low wage as an international correspondent for a number of Spanish-language magazines and newspapers. He was living abroad – before settling in Mexico City he spent time in Caracas, Paris and Barcelona – all while nurturing his ambition to become a world-renowned novelist. They had fled Colombia because García Márquez didn’t feel at ease with the right-wing government in his country. At the time, he was living with Mercedes, his wife, and his two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, in Mexico City. Writing his masterpiece, nevertheless, wasn’t easy. But it’s undeniable that the revolution had a major impact on the tone of One Hundred Years of Solitude: it gave García Marquez hope for the fate of Latin America.

However, in the ensuing years, most of them grew disappointed and distanced themselves from the Cuban model. Many intellectuals – Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others – shared García Márquez’s enthusiasm. What struck him the most was the real possibility of a new order for countries in this hemisphere, far from the pressure and demands of the United States. When García Márquez was in the first stages of his immense saga, he became fascinated with the turn of events in Cuba. This led to abrupt and, for the most part, confusing social changes, including the Cuban Revolution, led by Ernesto Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Some countries – such as Chile, Colombia and Mexico – were struggling with instability, dictatorships, and political violence. Why The Handmaid’s Tale is so relevant todayĭuring the second half of the 20th Century, Latin America went through a convulsive period. From his little studio in Mexico City, patiently composing on his typewriter, he reimagined the genesis of the continent and by doing so changed its future forever. Many decades later, García Márquez embarked on a second Discovery of America. The continent, obviously, wasn’t a new place when Gabriel García Márquez wrote his acclaimed novel: the authors known as Cronistas de Indias, during the 15th and 16th Centuries, undertook the task of describing the land they named unknown things while seeing them for the first time. Before One Hundred Years of Solitude, Latin America bore certain similarities to the imaginary place described in the first paragraph of the novel: “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point”.

One hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcía