“One Hundred Years of Solitude” and the detail from the trailer that maybe you didn’t notice

What has not been said about “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, a novel that gave new life to magical realism, where Elena Garro had already stood out in previous years with “Memories of the Future” and Juan Rulfo with “Pedro Páramo”. Regarding the series, we share fragments of a text that the Peruvian writer José Miguel Oviedo published in El Comercio in 1967, the same year the novel was published.

Few novels have been awaited with more interest, with more prior attention, than One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. The magazine “Mundo Nuevo” published two chapters of it, the last just two months before the book’s appearance in May of this year; In that same magazine, the novelist Carlos Fuentes, after reading the first 75 pages of the novel, said that García Márquez had masterfully put an end to the venerable American tropicalism: “He is installed in the old vegetal kingdoms of Gallegos and Rivera, only to free them of that dead weight and reintegrate them into the imagination with a humor, a beauty, an authentic compassion that Arturo Cova or Sute Cúpira or Santos Luzardo could never have”; In the pages of “Amaru” another different chapter appeared – and in “Eco”, from Bogotá, a fourth. All this was happening while the “Sudamericana” publishing house was preparing the edition of 10,000 copies. calculated to comfortably cover the continental market. One month later it was sold out and another one had to be released, also of 10,000 volumes. Simultaneously, critics showered the author with praise and declared themselves stunned by the fabulous proportions of the novel. The story of One Hundred Years of Solitude is just beginning, but it is already a golden success story.

[…]

Genealogical complications may suggest that this novel is impenetrable. Ultimately, they matter little: these confusions are perhaps part of the charm of the novel which, due to its technique, is much simpler and more transparent than many novels written today. The story is virtually linear; There is barely a moderate retrospection in the first 100 pages, the axis of which is the moment when, years later, Colonel Aureliano faces the firing squad, a scene that deliberately misleads the reader because the colonel does not die on that occasion. […] There is no waste in the novel because everything is placed under a very high atmospheric pressure, everything is gigantic and tremendous: men are colossal patriarchs, eager to consummate violent possessions and breed to the point of excess; Wars are a custom that families inherit: omens and divinations are read almost like newspapers; Words are not used to communicate, but to exchange sarcasm and annihilate each other verbally, in the absence of weapons. […] “One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most astonishing and memorable novels or figures that, from Latin America, have been written about the eternal human tragedy, that struggle that the Angel wages with the Devil.