Not Pynchon. Marquez. A Hundred Years of Solitude. If interested.

[Mark Kohut]

The origin story of the writing of this novel is fascinating, if true.
Suffering writer's block
(as a novelist) for a few years, although a hard-working journalist,
Marquez told friends he wouldn't write fiction again, maybe.

Driving his child to school one day in 1965, the famous first line and
whole book concept came to him. He went home, told his wife to handle
everything in their life and retreated
to a room where, eight hours a day, he wrote A Hundred Years with full
concentration,
getting down the story "he had written his whole life." (Elsewhere I
remember him
saying he 'had the idea" when he was 12). That full concentration shows, I
say.

First printing in Spanish, 10,000,--by a good publisher who had asked to
reprint his early work but who sent this one instead!. It sold out in a
month with a second printing of 80,000! (Few books
have such a disparate ratio in the size of their printings ( at least in US
publishing. Peyton Place
had a huge differential, only one I can think of at the moment. To Kill a
Mockingbird may have been another since printed to not sell, but I doubt
it).

It was THE Spanish-language book everyone who read novels in the language
had to read.
20 million sold by 2002.

It had huge international buzz as it was being translated into other
languages.This was adumbrated
in a biography of Heller or Bellow that I've read--who did give the
original English edition a quote, I believe.

It was the first Latin American book on US bestseller lists!

Harold Bloom actually thinks it has too much going on in it ( which must
imply 'formlessly', I guess) to be one of the greatest novels!

Besides Faulkner as an influence from his first novel, a lesser-know
Mexican writer, Juan Rolfo, one
large novel in particular, lay behind this book, along with folk tales and
village stories and religion and myth, of course. (Marquez read and
actually 'studied' this novel years before).
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