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

[Ian Livingston]

I have for decades wished I could read and relish A Hundred Years of
Solitude in Spanish. It makes me feel a little wistful that in the course
of a lifetime in California I never learned the language.

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 3:11 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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