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One Hundred Years of Solitude has been and continues to be a phenomenal success around the world. When the novel first came out, its Argentine publisher perfected gradual sales of 10,000 copies or so, followed by a drop in interest. Instead the first printing—of 8,000 copies—sold out within one week. The novel took all of Latin America by storm, and by now has sold many millions of copies in the Spanish-speaking world alone. Earning García Márquez instant and universal fame, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into more than 30 languages worldwide. Even in Soviet Russia the novel quickly sold a million copies, causing such amazement that there is a story often cited by Garcia Márquez of “the elderly Soviet woman who copied out the entire text of the novel word by word, in order to make sure she had really read what she had read”. The novel received numerous awards, including Italy’s Chianciano Prize, the title of the best foreign book of the year in France, and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which is the most prestigious Latin American literary prize.
As one might expect, reviews were almost unanimously positive. Early Latin American reviewers called it “the best Colombian novel of all time,” “the great novel of America,” and “one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century”. In an influential review for an Argentine journal, Tomás Eloy Martínez praised the novel – “everything that occurs in One Hundred Years of Solitude is important”- but located its “one Achilles’ heel” in the great beauty of its language: “the perfect arrangement of the words sweetens the experience of reading, slows it down periodically, and finally anesthetizes our sense of taste and smell”. Writing in Spanish for Hispania, Gabriela Mora-Cruz pointed out that Márquez’s fictional world, like real life, includes everything from love to cruelty to births, deaths, violence, superstition, politics, and comedy. The novel, she concluded, for all its magical realism, reproduces the very rhythm of existence.
Like many other epics, this novel has connections with a particular people’s historical reality, in this case, the development of the Latin American country of Colombia since its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century (1810 to 1825). The seemingly endless civil war portrayed in the novel one can see as directly based on the civil wars in Columbia from 1885 to 1902, and the character of Colonel Aureliano has many affinities with General Rafael Uribe Uribe, under whom the grandfather of the author fought. Uribe’s struggles ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Neerlandia, an event in the novel. The years 1900 to 1928 saw the take over of Colombia by the United Fruit Company of Boston. The ensuing labor trouble culminated on October 7, 1928, in a mass strike of 32,000 workers. The government later sent out the troops to fight the workers, and a massacre took place in Cienaga on December 5, 1928. In addition of course, and most importantly for an understanding of the novel, is the presence in it of the author’s family and of the author himself. This point, as I shall argue later, is a key point in understanding what the political point of this epic might be.
I mention this history, not because I think one needs to know the historical facts in order to appreciate the novel, but simply to point out that One Hundred Years of Solitude, like so many other great epics, like Moby Dick, The Song of Roland, and War and Peace, takes its origin in the history, real or imagined, of a particular people.
Given this epic quality of the novel, the initial question I would like to pose is this: What qualities of life does this novel celebrate? What is the nature of the social-political vision held up here for our inspection? How are we intended to judge the people and the society of Macondo? This, I would claim, is a fairly obvious question which the novel pressures any reader to ask, as a number of critics have pointed out:
One Hundred Years of Solitude … can justly lay claim to being, perhaps, the greatest of all Latin American novels, appropriately enough, since the story of the Buendia family is obviously a metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is, for the neocolonial period. More than that, though, it is also, I believe, a narrative about the myths of Latin American history.
I do not believe any other novelist has so acutely, so truthfully seen the intimate relationship between the socio-political structure of a given country and the behavior of his characters.
So what is meant to derive from the experience of the civilization depicted in the novel? One possible source of information, the author, has remained stubbornly silent on this question, refusing to debate whether or not there is a political ‘message’ in his novel. His roots with the civilization are obvious enough, for he spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a ‘steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast.’ But he has commented ‘Nothing interesting has happened to me since.’ ‘He also tells the story that his grandmother invented fantasies so that he wouldn’t be saddened by the truth of things. We will be coming back to this latter comment later on. When pressed on the subject of this novel, Marquez has said that he really wanted to write a book about incest.
If a number of readers have seen considerable political significance in the novel, there has been no agreement about what that political ‘message’ might be. The novel has attracted all sorts of conflicting political interpretations. One writer has remarked, with good justification, that there is something here for every political view: ‘[The novel’s] appeal is to all ideologies: leftists like its dealing with social struggles and its portraits of imperialism; conservatives are heartened by the corruption and/or failure of those struggles and with the sustaining role of the family; nihilists and quietists find their pessimism reconfirmed, and the apolitical hedonists find solace in all the sex and swashbuckling’.
To all of these, we might add those readers who decline to see any social-political themes in the novel and who like it because it’s a great escapist read. And whatever I might like to claim for its wider implications, One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly a wonderful and popular read, which one can enjoy without having any particular awareness of its historical roots or its political implications. That may be the main reason why it has been such a phenomenally popular book outside Latin America: ‘The first truly international best-seller in Latin American publishing history’ (Martin 98), for which the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
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