We read in the New York Times that One Hundred Years of Solitude has now become a full-fledged element in the zeitgeist. People use the book to strike up conversations: "Is this your first time? Oh, I remember when I first read it...." Characters in the novels of Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis aspire to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, give the novel to each other, occasionally open the book and peer at the odd page, but, of course, never go all the way. This confers on the text the status of classic; that is, a book universally esteemed--and beyond critical discussion.
The conclusion that no one actually reads One Hundred Years of Solitude would doubtless be unfair and inaccurate. Thousands of readers have found their way through the paperback edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the one with the naked couple on the cover kissing in a jungle that discreetly rises to obscure their erotic embrace while titillating the reader's prurience. Misguided readers who judge books by their covers certainly must feel cheated when they reach the end, because García Márquez here renders sex so comic and ludicrous that the few steamy scenes he does include are innocent and harmless.
Excluding readers who buy the book as pornography or who receive it as an unbidden gift, the fact is that the reading public is still drawn to One Hundred Years of Solitude twenty-one years after it first appeared in Spanish. This is because the book is a fascinating carnival that combines humor, parody, social criticism, and the marvelous--all in one huge but lightning-fast narrative jaunt.
How Gabriel García Márquez came to be the author of this literary whirlwind is something of a mystery. It is always easy to find the seeds of genius in the early works of a writer once he or she has produced a masterpiece; working in the other direction is impossible, as so many literary editors have discovered to their dismay. Retracing the steps that lead from Aracataca, the Colombian town (conveniently located near a banana plantation named Macondo) where Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 16, 1928, to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Buenos Aires in 1967, and from there to the recent publication of Love in the Time of Cholera reveals that while the child may be the father of the man, the works of a young author do not lead in any logical way to those of his maturity.
It is possible to follow mutations back along their family tree, but predicting mutations--and within the context of García Márquez's writing, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a mutation--is virtually impossible. Thus, if we return to 1955 and García Márquez's first (and, on a Colombian scale, successful) novel, Leafstorm, we see some of the fixtures of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it is as if they were being deployed by another author. Which, to some extent, is the case. The setting of Leafstorm is a small town, an avatar of Macondo shortly before the hurricane in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the main characters are members of a decayed, aristocratic family (the "leafstorm" of the title refers to the riffraff that "blows" into town with the advent of the foreign-owned banana company), but the style and narrative point of view belong to William Faulkner.
Faulkner's influence on Latin American writers--Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Carlos Onetti, to mention just three of the most important--is immense, to the point that
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