I read last week that Netflix has attempted to do what I thought was impossible – turn One Hundred Years of Solitude into a 16-episode television series.
I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez when I was in college in the early 1970s. It had been translated into English and published in the U.S., and I bought the paperback edition at the LSU Union Bookstore. It might have been near exam time; I had a habit of buying riveting novels at exam time, when I should have been studying.
I read the novel two more times, both in the 1980s. I was in a masters program at Washington University at St. Louis, with the seminars held at night for those of us who were working (which was all of us). I took a course in the Latin American Novel, mostly on the strength of what I remembered about One Hundred Years of Solitude. We read that, and we also read The Green House and The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, and several others.
That class was organized to coincide with visits to the WashU campus by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes, and our class got to hear both authors speak. The talks added immeasurably to our reading.
Two years later, in the same masters program, I took a class called “The Nature of Story.” Our first assignment was to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. And in that class, something personally revealing happened.
The professor opened the discussion by asking what we thought of the book. Fifteen of us, all working people with me being the youngest at 35, looked around at each other. Finally, one person said she found the story to be ridiculous. And thirteen other people suddenly erupted in agreement.
The story was unreal. How could you take flying carpets and children born with pigs’ tails seriously? The use of the same names for different characters was confusing, as was the use of different names for the same characters.
The class went on a group rant. Nobody seemed to have liked the book.
“Did anyone like it? Anyone at all” the professor asked.
“I did,” I said. “I know it’s one of the fathers of magic realism, and story often goes off into the strange and weird. But reading this is like reading about my own family. I grew up hearing stories like these.”
A rather stunned silence followed. I don’t look Latin American, and, in fact, I don’t contain an iota of Hispanic DNA.
“Where did you grow up?” the professor asked.
“I was born and raised in New Orleans.”
He smiled. “The northern rim of the Caribbean culture.” He then launched into a discussion of what that meant and what the territory surrounding the Gulf of Mexico / Caribbean Sea shared as a common culture. And you could see understanding appear on the faces around the table. One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t only a novel in the magic realism genre; it was an introduction to countries, peoples, and cultures that shared more in common than people realized.
I don’t write magic realism. But that day, I understood that, as Anglo (with a bit of French thrown in) as I was, I had been raised in an American / Caribbean culture, and it affects how you think, how you understand the world, and how you write.
Even with the children with pigs’ tails and the flying carpets.
Top photograph: The Cocora Valley in Colombia, photo by Christian Holzinger via Unsplash. Used with permission.
Brian Miller says
Thanks for sharing that memory, Glynn. I always described Louisiana as the northernmost banana republic. But I get the comparison.
And a 16 part episode just might be able to do the book justice.
My best,
Brian