How Gabriel García Márquez Brought 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' to Life
After two decades of stalled efforts, the author found his memorable opening and the
proper literary voice to deliver the transcendent work based on the Colombian town of his childhood.
By the mid-1960s, erstwhile journalist Gabriel García Márquez had carved out a
respectable professional career in Mexico City after years of itinerancy.
A job writing copy for a prominent advertising agency enabled him to properly care
for his wife Mercedes and their two young children. Meanwhile, a successful side
career of screenwriting was also bearing fruit, with multiple projects in production.
Yet Gabo, as he was known to friends and family, was profoundly unfulfilled. His four
published novels had earned some fans in Spanish-speaking areas of the world but
sold modestly. And the story he really wanted to tell, based on his recollections of
growing up in the tiny coastal town of Aracataca, Colombia, was still gestating in his
mind after two decades of starts and stops.
Fortunately, his luck was about to turn. First came the news that a New York publisher
wanted the English-language rights to his four novels. Then came the rush of
inspiration that brought about his fifth, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de
Soledad), a work that not only provided the outlet for years of creative frustration but
also profoundly impacted the course of Western literature.
As told in Gerald Martin's Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life, the author's "eureka"
moment arrived as he was driving the family to their planned vacation in Acapulco in
July 1965 and found himself turning over the line that would soon greet readers at the start of the book:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to
remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
Depending on the version of this anecdote, García Márquez either immediately drove
his family back home to begin writing or spent the vacation scribbling out ideas.
Either way, he knew he finally found his way into the story that resisted all previous efforts at being realized.
In addition to the attention-seizing opening came an understanding of how García
Márquez would finally present a narrative in which legend and fantasy fused with the
mundane details of everyday life. For this, Gabo built on the techniques employed in
his time- and narrative-shifting first novel, Leaf Storm (La hojarasca), resulting in a
style now known as magical realism. The genre is a predominantly Latin American
branch of fiction that incorporates mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.
He also found the voice in his head that became the conduit for the tone he was trying
to capture. "I remembered that my grandmother used to tell me the most atrocious
things without getting all worked up as if she'd just seen them," García Márquez told
the Spanish publication Triunfo. "I then realized that that imperturbability and that
richness of imagery with which my grandma told stories was what gave verisimilitude
to mine. ... How was I going to make my readers believe it? By using my grandmother's same methods."
Holed up in his eight-by-ten-foot writer's room, dubbed "the Cave of the Mafia,"
García Márquez began pounding out his tale on an Olivetti typewriter. He quit his day
job with the ad agency in September and built his writing schedule around the window
when his children were at school.
Soon, the story about seven generations of the Buendía family in the idyllic-turned-
decrepit hamlet of Macondo took shape around fantasy-imbued memories of the
author's childhood. Some, like the banana-workers strike, which took place around the
year García Márquez was born, became key plot points in the novel. Others, such as a
local priest who supposedly levitated, joined a cast of characters who enriched the
story with their surreal qualities.
García Márquez also wove in versions of his grandparents, his wife, his friends and
even himself—in both Aureliano Buendía and the gypsy leader Melquíades—but
never a direct replica of any one person. "All my characters are composites of people
I've known," he told Playboy in 1982.
Even if his loved ones weren't fully represented, Gabo poured enough feeling into his
creations that he found them difficult to kill off. Both Buendía matriarch Úrsula
Iguarán and mistress Pilar Ternera hang on through the story for more than 100 years.
And after he finally wrote out the (non-firing squad) death of Aureliano Buendía, the
emotionally exhausted author crawled into bed and cried for two hours.
From the very beginning of his ambitious effort, García Márquez benefitted from a
support system of friends who provided crucial feedback. As described in A Life, he
would write all morning into the afternoon, dig into his reference books to check some
of his facts and then share his day's work with a trusted circle of confidants.
Other friends helped drum up interest in the latest work of this still largely unknown
writer. Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a prominent figure in Latin American
literature, passed along glowing reviews of the work in progress and saw to it that
completed chapters were published in magazines.
Still, despite all the encouragement to continue with his opus, García Márquez took a
major risk by pressing forward with no source of income to support his wife and two
children. They sold the family car, and when that cash ran dry, Mercedes began
beating a regular path to the pawnshop with the TV, radio and jewelry. Somehow, she
convinced their butcher to sell them meat on an ever-extending line of credit and the
landlord to forego collecting rent for several months.
By this point, García Márquez had generated enough momentum that he was able to
ignore these outside pressures and even inject a few inside jokes for his reader friends
as the novel reached its conclusion. The title also came to him around this point, as he
calculated that approximately 143 years had passed in the story.
By the time he finished One Hundred Years of Solitude in August 1966, García
Márquez was 120,000 pesos ($10,000) in debt. He didn't even have enough money to
mail the manuscript to the Argentine publishing house Editorial Sudamericana, so he
initially sent out half of the pages and returned to the post office after one more trip to
the pawnshop. Afterward, Mercedes reportedly quipped, "Hey, Gabo, all we need now
is for the book to be no good."