The novel came off the press in Buenos Aires on May 30, 1967, two days before Sgt. Gabriel García Márquez began writing Cien Años de Soledad-One Hundred Years of Solitude-a half-century ago, finishing in late 1966. Month by month the typescript grew, presaging the weight that the great novel and the “solitude of fame,” as he would later put it, would inflict on him. “In my dreams, I was inventing literature,” he recalled. He led his people on the long march through civil war and colonialism and banana-republicanism he trailed them into their bedrooms and witnessed sexual adventures obscene and incestuous. He visited a plague of insomnia upon the people of Macondo he made a priest levitate, powered by hot chocolate he sent down a swarm of yellow butterflies. Outside, it was the 1960s inside, it was the deep time of the pre-modern Americas, and the author at his typewriter was all-powerful. Stuck up on the wall were charts of the history of a Caribbean town he called Macondo and the genealogy of the family he named the Buendías. LPs were on the record player: Debussy, Bartók, A Hard Day’s Night. Cigarettes (he smoked 60 a day) were on the worktable. The house, in a quiet part of Mexico City, had a study within, and in the study he found a solitude he had never known before and would never know again.
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