Table of Contents
ASCENT TO GLORY
LVARO SANTANA-ACUA
ASCENT TO GLORY
How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2020 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54543-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Santana-Acua, lvaro, author.
Title: Ascent to glory : how One hundred years of solitude was written and became a global classic / lvaro Santana-Acua.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019056923 (print) | LCCN 2019056924 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231184328 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231184335 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231545433 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Garca Mrquez, Gabriel, 1927-2014. Cien aos de soledad.
Classification: LCC PQ8180.17.A73 C5377 2020 (print) | LCC PQ8180.17.A73 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056923
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056924
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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Cover design: Lisa Hamm
Canary shape: detail from Gabriel Garca Mrquez by Wolf Gang, CC BY-SA 2.0.
House shape: detail from first page of typescript of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1966), Harry Ransom Center.
Tree shape: detail from Vicente Rojos cover for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
Butterfly shape: detail from cover of first edition of Leaf Storm (1955).
To Flix lvaro Acua Dorta
&
Mara Teresa Bennasar Gonzlez
CONTENTS
I n the summer of 1965, an unknown writer was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two children when, suddenly, a cow crossed the road in front of his car. He stopped abruptly. What happened next was a Newtonian moment, a miracle of the imagination. Right there on the road, in a stroke of brilliant insight, the writer came up with the first sentence of a novel that would change world literature: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buenda was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Knowing there was not a second to lose, he turned his car around and rushed back home to Mexico City. He quit his job and locked himself up in his studio until he finished the novel. Debts skyrocketed as he spent months writing. He fell behind on rent payments, lived on the generosity of his friends and neighbors, and ended up pawning his car, his wifes dowry jewels, and even his typewriter. Nothing could stop him. Eighteen months later, he emerged from his studio with a completed manuscript. When he went to the post office to mail it to a possible publisher in Argentina, the bankrupt writer realized that he did not have enough money to send the whole manuscript. He had to divide it into two parts and mailed only one part. When he arrived home, he looked at the pages in his hands and discovered his mistake: he had just mailed the second part of the manuscript, not the first as he had intended. What a terrible way, he might have thought, of pitching the novel that took him so much effort to write! Luckily, the pages that he sent astonished the publisher, who knew that the novel would be a great success and hurried to offer the
This story about how this Colombian author created One Hundred Years of Solitude is in reality a fascinating legend, now passed on from generation to generation. Parts of this legend are true and other parts are not, like Isaac Newtons story about discovering the theory of gravity after an apple fell on his head. What is remarkable about these cases is how legends often find in the pages of famous books and in the minds of people the most fertile soil to take root and grow. Shared and reinvented again and again, legends eventually become myths. One such myth refers to the artist who, after a stroke of inspiration, has to struggle financially in order to create a work of art. Poverty loomed over Mozart while composing works that revolutionized music, over Edgar Allan Poe while writing short stories that transformed modern literature, over Picasso while striving to sell his first cubist paintings, and over Garca Mrquez while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet this myth of the creative genius cornered by economic hardship is more than a familiar story: it is a social pattern that ends up magnifying the difficulties that artists faced while creating their work. And as myths of this kind grow over time, they also obscure important details about how a work of art was really conceived and hence make it more challenging to explain how it turned into a classic.
The story of how One Hundred Years of Solitude actually came into being is even more fascinating than the legends and myths that surround this novel. When it was released in 1967, neither the publisher nor the author expected much of it. They knew, as publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf once said, many a novel is dead the day it is published. Yet something unexpected happened. This novel did not die the day of its publication. Instead, it started to live what would prove to be a long life. The story of how this novel about a remote Caribbean town has become the most famous work of Latin American literature and a global classic is spellbinding. Ascent to Glory seeks to tell this story, using especially numerous new sources, including the ones kept in Garca Mrquezs personal archives.
At the heart of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the tale of the Buenda family and their town of Macondo, which was the scene of natural catastrophes, civil wars, and magical incidents. In the end, as prophesized by a manuscript that generations of Buendas tried to decipher, a biblical hurricane destroyed Macondo after the last Buenda was born with a pigs tail. To readers familiar with the global success of the novel since its publication in 1967, choosing it as the subject of this book comes as no surprise. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the work of Latin American literature par excellence. It is also the most read literary work in Spanish after Don Quixote. It has been translated into forty-nine languages, has sold over fifty million copies, and is listed among the top thirty best-selling literary works of all time. A 2009 survey among international writers published in the British newspaper the Guardian ranked it as the novel that has most influenced world literature over the past three decades. This influence still continues and is largely due to the novels association with magical realism, a style that mixes stories of ordinary life with magical events. This style has now expanded into a global genre with its own art market.
Magical realism is present in award-winning works and international best sellers such as The House of the Spirits by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende; Pig Tales by the French author Marie Darrieussecq;
