On Cien años de soledad

It would be a mistake to think of Márquez’s literary universe as an invented, self-referential, closed system. He is not writing about Middle-earth, but about the one we all inhabit. Macondo exists. That is its magic.
Salman Rushdie

One Christmas, when I was in my mid-twenties, my father, who managed a bookstore, gave me a gift.

“I think you’re going to like this,” he said as he handed me a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez’s highly celebrated novel in its English language translation.

During my years as an undergraduate student, I had strayed away from literature written in Spanish. On occasion I’d read my favorite poets, in Spanish—Pablo Neruda, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, and Ernesto Cardenal, mostly—but the novels I devoted my leisure time to were in English. (At the time my father gave me Cien años de soledad I was going through an obsessive J.R.R. Tolkien phase, having devoured The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings five times each.)

From the opening sentence, One Hundred Years of Solitude took possession of my heart. Halfway through the novel, I was dreading my eventual arrival to the book's last page; and throughout the entire reading, García Marquez’s work held me tightly in its spell. I never wanted that experience to end.

The characters and their stories, although greatly exaggerated, were so immediate, so familiar to me, that I could easily fool myself into believing that the Colombian writer had used several relatives from my grandparents’ generation, and quite a few of their friends, as his models. Interestingly, since then I’ve learned that many Latin Americans who’ve read this book have also felt the same way. Without a doubt, García Márquez was able to mine, masterfully so, the rich vein of our shared cultural heritage.

In addition, One Hundred Years of Solitude opened my eyes to the astonishing world of the Latin American novel. And this book, more than any other, was responsible for inspiring me to pursue a career in literature—both as a teacher and as a writer.

More importantly, though, Cien años de soledad made me immensely proud of my culture; and my father’s gift that Christmas confirmed what in my heart I had known all along—that the universe in which I spent my adolescence, all those years ago in Nicaragua, was, indeed, magical.