“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez

Artists often talk about it when they speak about their work: they speak of inspiration, of revelation, of the power of creativity. And of feeling like a medium that carries things from an unknown place into the here and now.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude”: no other example demonstrates this mystical process better. An unsuccessful author, who is moreover suffering from writer’s block, has to go to his writing desk with nothing done, because suddenly he has the whole story in his head.

Colombia – no: the whole of Latin America chose Gabriel García Márquez (1927—2014) as its medium to tell the story of a battered continent. The millions of things, the just as many words that could never be spoken, came together thanks to his inspiration into a single, great narrative, iridescent in its breadth and fluorescent in its depths.

The book tells the story of the Buendia family over six generations and of the village of Macondo that it founded. Moving back and forth in time, the fictional place is used to unfold the history of Colombia, beginning with colonisation and ending with neo-imperialism. In doing so, the narrative elements capture everything that hardly anyone had been able to fit into 500 pages before. The story in the book is one thing, the experience of reading it another.

The novel by the Nobel laureate in Literature (1982) is regarded as the showpiece of magical realism, and Pablo Neruda called it the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”. And its success in figures is impressive: since its publication in 1967, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has been translated into 37 languages and has sold more than 30 million copies. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” suddenly makes the unspeakable tangible and still reads as topical today.

Precisely because democracies are under threat and, under neo-capitalism and globalisation, people all over the world are finding themselves in new distress. Macondo is everywhere. Reading this book, too, could help ensure that the present state of affairs does not end in an apocalypse.