It's the time of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian nobel laureate, this is a memorable year—his 80^th birthday, the 40^th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and, this week, a return after 25 years (officially, anyway) to his birthplace, Aracataca, immortalized as Macondo.

He and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, traveled back to Aracataca in the inaugural trip of a train dubbed the Macondo Express, adorned with images of the yellow butterflies, like those that always accompanied Macondo’s irrepressible Mauricio Babilonia.

Forty years earlier, recalls Tomás Eloy Martínez in the Argentine daily La Nación, Garcia Marquez had traveled to Buenos Aires, where Cien Años de Soledad was initially published.

Fame and fortune was still in the future, the hardships of paying his family’s bills in Mexico City and securing with the postage to ship off the manuscript  the present. The initial printing was only 8,000 copies.

But word was already coursing through Latin American literary circles about the seminal achievement that would eventually sell more than 30 million copies, translated into 35 languages. One morning 40 years ago in Buenos Aires, Eloy Martínez recounts, García Márquez suddenly got up from the breakfast table, took his wife by hand, stopped traffic at a busy downtown intersection, and kissed her right there on the street.

``He did it because I was thinner then,’’ his wife said recently, recalling the romantic episode.

``Don’t say that,’’ cautioned García Márquez, ``because I’m capable of doing it again right now.’’

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires

Comments

[Doug Terry terryreport.com]

Writers from Latin America turned the world upside down with their works in the last century, taking over from great American writers of the first fifty years of the 20th century. Now, I wonder if we will ever see a moment again in American literary life where a novel, any novel, means so much and takes, even for a short time, center stage in our national cultural life. We have entered a time when everything means something and, thus, almost nothing. Film and celeb gossip have pushed literature aside. Perhaps it was never so important as imagined, but there was a time when writing, at least seemed to be, a major part of life.

[nico]

Thanks for the interesting, informative contributions.
I like the combination of culture, politics and general interest
in this featured blog.