The year 2017 marked fifty years of the publication of Gabriel Garcìa Márquez’s magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. First published in Spanish in 1967, the book had created quite a sensation in the whole of South America - including Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and in the rookie novelist’s native Columbia. Buoyed by the unprecedented success of the novel, Márquez is said to have asked his Argentine novelist friend Julio Cortázar to recommend a translator. “Get Gregory Rabassa”, Cortázar seems to have told him. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Rabassa, came out in March 1970. The book would go on to sell more than 50 million copies worldwide and would become at once the most acclaimed novel in translation, and of course the most popular. When Márquez himself read the English translation he’s said to have uneqivocally pronounced it better than the Spanish original. Published in 44 languages since then, the book remains the most translated literary work in Spanish after Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
Half a century later, it seems to have entered into popular imagination like no other book ever before. It continues to be read by an eclectic mix of people - by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Shakira, and by politicians like Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The novel has inspired a host of novelists including Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie.
Several online literary sites have their chosen lists of ‘books to read before you die’ and googling various combinations of all-time great books I could find only a few that made their way to almost all the lists. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one such book. According to a survey of international writers commissioned by literary journal Wasafiri in 2009, this novel topped the list of books that shaped world literature over the last 25 years. The book, in fact, set the stage for Márquez’s 1982 Nobel prize for literature.
Reading the book the lay reader in me won’t dare to touch its thematic contents or stylistic elements, especially after reams of paper have been exhausted over the years by the finest literary minds dwelling on them.
Yet, having said that, I find One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of the undeniable classics where there’re no dull moments despite the presence of seven generation of characters (having similar names) who are controlled by their pasts (and often visited by ghosts). The New York Times Book Review has indeed put it most aptly : “One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race”.
The Latin aphorism “Ars longa, vita brevis” is often rendered in English as “Art is long, life is short”. And if this be so it’s about time, dear readers, to get hold of the book and get going right away into García Márquez’s magical world of Solitude.
The writer is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading.
