by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Chronicle of a Novel Foretold
“… the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
That’s William Kennedy, describing his friend’s Gabriel García Márquez ’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in the New York Times Book Review in the eighties, when García Márquez was freshly Nobeled.
Kennedy is one of many writers who have likened the novel to the Bible or scripture. Myself, I don’t see it as scriptural at all: its mode of characterization is far too personal and individual.
But the novel is akin to scripture in that it seems to have been there always, a permanent text, acknowledged, alluded to and imitated by writers hardly aware of they are doing it, such is its influence on them.
So I was interested, and then fascinated, to learn that the novel had a grand and complicated coming-into-being story, one equal parts exalted (Gabo feeling the first chapter delivered to him as if in a vision during a long drive out of Mexico City) and matter-of-fact (the translator Gregory Rabassa producing his extraordinary English rendering at a rented place on Long Island during his summer break from teaching at Queens College).
That’s the story I set out to tell in “Fifty Years of Solitude,” published in the December Vanity Fair and now up online. Philip Larkin liked to say he wrote the poems he would have liked to read, and that’s the case here: I’ve tried to write the piece about the novel that I would have liked to come upon in the magazine: one that lets us follow Gabo from breakout young journalist to struggling novelist to middling screenwriter to epically obsessed creator of the village of Macondo and its inhabitants – and from there to fame, fortune, glory, and enduring worldwide renown akin to immortality.
It’s also the story of Carmen Balcells, literary agent to Gabo and a whole posse of great Spanish-language writers. Balcells died in September, a few weeks after I spent an afternoon with her in Barcelona. I hope she is as present in the piece as she was in the lives and careers of her writers.