A grand year for Garcia Marquez.

• Author: Pena, Hector
• Position: MILESTONES AND FIRST EDITIONS - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

SO MUCH H AS BEEN written about Gabriel Garcia Marquez that it is as if a light had been shined through a prism, casting an entire rainbow of opinions. The author's eightieth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude have led the literary world and the media in general to celebrate the personality and work of this icon of letters.

The milestones help put the man and the writer into perspective. For the first four decades of his life, Garcia Marquez (known as Gabo) went through a number of financial ups and downs, always finding ways to overcome the challenges through his writing, whether through short stories, novels, or journalism. It is clear that if One Hundred Years of Solitude had not appeared, we would no doubt be looking at a good novelist, but not the magician that the world embraced with such astonishment and admiration.

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From one day to the next, the writer who had been known only in a few literary circles became a publishing phenomenon whose fame snowballed with each translation of his work. Over the last 40 years, innumerable pages have been written about him by critics digging for the roots and meanings of his stories. From the first moment, surprised readers would ask, Where did the universe of Macondo come from? How were such wonders possible? Critics have racked their brains, and many have taken the author's sense of fable too much to heart, indulging in excesses of speculation and imagination to invent all sorts of explanations or arguments. One Hundred Years of Solitude became, in their view, a Latin American Bible, or a new version of Oedipus Rex--a kind of Latin American surrealist story, a metaphor for modern man and a sick society, or even a rewriting of ancient myths, and on and on. Garcia Marquez himself has poked fun at the critics, and in an interview with journalist Rita Guibert (Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert), he once said that it was "nothing of the sort. I merely wanted to tell the story of a family who for a hundred years did everything they could to prevent having a son with a pig's tail, and just because of their very efforts to avoid having one they ended up by doing so. Synthetically speaking, that's the plot of the book, but all that about symbolism ... not at all. Someone who isn't a critic said that the interest the novel had aroused was probably due to the fact that it was the first real description...