Volume 14, Number 6 · March 26, 1970
Master Builder
By Jack Richardson
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Harper & Row, 422 pp., $7.95
Since its publication in 1967, Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad has provoked throughout Latin America reactions far beyond those of ordinary critical approval. Indeed, this novel by a Colombian writer who has lived in Europe for the last fifteen years has been welcomed, written about, and discussed by Spanish readers with an almost relieved exuberance, as if to suggest that the style and sensibility of their history had at last been represented by a writer who understands their particular secrets and rhythms, by a writer who, moreover, presents these qualities with a classic lucidity and humor, and whose art is large enough to include the rough and the fastidious taste, to be epic at a time when so much of what is interesting in literature belongs to the idiosyncratic and consciously complex—certainly timely qualities for our fiction, but qualities not particularly suited to an imagination which wishes to span a century of narrative or catch the essence of an entire culture.
Review, 2395 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |