Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin
In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small world of Latin American letters. Still, money was tight and imaginative writing had to be supplemented with income from other sources — journalism, the writing of advertising copy. He had driven some way on the winding road to Acapulco when suddenly, ‘from nowhere’ he afterwards said, a sentence came into his head:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember the day his father took him to discover the ice.
Gabriel García Márquez, it is said — though Gerald Martin, as a respectable Anglo-Saxon mythbusting biographer, disputes the version of the story — promptly braked the car and drove back to Mexico City, where he sat down at a typewriter and did not get up until his great novel was finished.
Legends coagulated around One Hundred Years of Solitude even before it was finished, from its celebrated first sentence onwards. People were describing it as a great novel when they had seen only its first 80 pages. It was a famous work long before its publication, as García Márquez gave a reading to a spellbound audience in Mexico City. Once it was published — García Márquez’s wife, Mercedes, had to pawn her hairdryer and liquidiser to pay the postage, standing by her husband as it went off like, Martin says, ‘two survivors of a catastrophe’ — it quickly took over the world. Few people who read it at the time, and very few since, have been immune to its overpowering, torrential imaginative force.
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