|
García Márquez celebrates his “140
years of solitude”
MEXICO (EFE).—The Colombian writer Gabriel García
Márquez is to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the
publication of his most outstanding novel One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and the 25th of his
Nobel Literature Prize (1982) this year.
Close friend of Fidel and Cuba,
Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo) today begins a
new Spring. |
Despite of shunning large public activities, in 2007
García Márquez is not going to be able to avoid
being the object of a number of public tributes such
as the one organized by the 4th International
Congress of the Spanish Language, scheduled for
March in the Colombian city of Cartagena.
“These tributes are well merited because García
Márquez is about to turn 80, has made a major
contribution to world literature and because One
Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the
marvelous works of the Spanish language,” Leticia
Sarmiento, literary critic and university lecturer
told EFE.
As
the writer himself has said on various occasions, it
was in Mexico in 1965 that he felt the definitive
inspiration to write One Hundred Years¼,
one of the most translated and read works in Spanish
that relates the story of the Buendía family over
various generations in the fictitious town of
Macondo.
The
Nobel Prize winner was traveling in a car with his
family from Mexico City to Acapulco on the Pacific
Ocean when in the heights of Cuervanaca, he had a
slight accident and decided not to continue the
journey.
 One
of the multiple “Macondo” conjectures on the famous
episode is that a cow crossed their path in the
road, caused the car to break down and forced him to
return home, but all the versions, including the
ones recounted by him, agree that at that moment in
January 1965 he finally glimpsed the keys he was
searching for to write his great first novel.
“It
was so matured in my mind that I could have dictated
the first chapter, word for word, to a typist there
and then, on the Cuernavaca highway,” García Márquez
affirmed much later, evoking that magical moment of
illumination.
His
colleague in the so-called Latin-American boom and
friend of the time, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas
Llosa, later related that Gabo shut himself away in
the study of his home in Mexico City for 18 months,
“equipped with large reserves of paper and
cigarettes,” to draft One Hundred Years¼.
The
Colombian writer previously asked his wife Mercedes
not to bother him “for any reason at all, especially
domestic matters,” according to Vargas Llosa.
The
Colombian author’s presence in Mexico at that moment
of inspiration was not a chance one. García Márquez
had arrived in that country on July 2, 1961 –
incidentally on the same day that Ernest Hemingway
committed suicide – with the plan of producing films
as he had learned in Rome.
Some
lifelong friends were awaiting him in the capital,
like the Colombian novelist, poet and essayist
Alvaro Mutis, who not only gave García Márquez
material aid, but introduced him to the book
Pedro Páramo, by Mexican Juan Rulfo, an event
that the author of One Hundred Years¼
considered crucial in terms of polishing his
narrative technique.
Like
Mutis, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and the
deceased Argentine novelist Julio Cortazar were
familiar with the original text of Gabo’s most
important novel, as various students of the
Colombian author’s works informed EFE.
Mutis, Fuentes and Cortázar had the impression that
their friend and colleague was writing an immortal
work from the initial lines: “Many years later,
facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía
had to recall that remote afternoon when his father
took him to see the ice.”
At
the end of 1966 a dazzled Argentine Sudamericana
Publishers accepted the typed text of One Hundred
Years of Solitude and published it in 1967, with
exceptional success.
The
novel sold 15,000 copies in the first few weeks in
the Argentine capital alone; to date more than 30
million copies have seen sold and the book has been
translated into 35 languages.
|
