Sunday book pick: ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is a novel you dream, not read
Since it was first published in 1967, the novel has sold more than 50 million copies. It was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa.
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A few days ago, when I was 30 pages away from finishing the book, I told my friend that Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude does not require you to be fully “aware” of what you are reading – you are allowed to slip into dreams, to let the words wash over you. The author is in complete control of his creation but as a reader, you can dip in and out of consciousness as you follow the Buendía family through seven generations of births, deaths, and other such occurrences.
A supernatural echo
Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, it is one of those novels that indeed needs no introduction. Often hailed as the greatest novel of the twentieth century, One Hundred Years of Solitude – published in Spanish in 1967, and in Gregory Rabassa’s incomparable English translation in 1970 – takes the family drama out of the living room and projects it as a town’s history. Jose Arcadio Buendía dreamt of a “city of mirrors that reflect the world in and about it” and founded Macondo by the riverside – a town that would soon become synonymous with the Buendía family. A name that had “no meaning at all” and only a “supernatural echo.” Its exceptional nature...
