Marquez's 'Total' Novel
Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College has an interesting article At The Chronicle on Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" on the occasion of its 40th birthday this year in which he muses on how, for him, the book's value has changed over the years.
My own relationship with the book has changed over time. I first read it in my teens and was transformed. It was the late 70s, and García Márquez's impact was being hailed: He had reinvented Latin America through his pen, infusing the region with magnetism. (...) As I matured, I remained in awe of García Márquez but didn't want to feel stifled under his shadow. Many writers of my generation, the so-called Latin American literary boom, were from urban centers and didn't empathize with his worldview. (...) In my 40s, I've returned to García Márquez's masterpiece. Now it seems to me that, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It's a "total" novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours.
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