One Hundred Years of Solitude (46 page)
Read One Hundred Years of Solitude Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,Gregory Rabassa
‘An imaginative writer of genius, the topmost pinnacle of an entire generation of Latin American novelists of cathedral-like proportions’
Guardian
In a decaying Colombian town the Colonel and his sick wife are living from day to day, scraping
together funds for food and medicine. Each Friday the Colonel waits for a letter to come in the post, hoping for the pension he is owed that will change their lives. While he waits the Colonel puts his hopes in his rooster – a prize bird that will make him money when cockfighting comes into season. But until then the bird – like the Colonel and his ailing wife – must somehow be fed …
‘Superb and intensely readable’
Time Out
‘An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December …’
When a witch doctor appears on the doorstep of the Marquis de Casalduero
prophesizing a plague of rabies in their Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims – until, that is, he hears that his young daughter, Sierva María, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive.
Sierva María appears completely unscathed – but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition,
it’s not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession and begin to see her supernatural powers as the cause of the town’s woes. Only the young priest charged with exorcising the evil spirit recognizes the girl’s sanity, but can he convince the town that it’s not her that needs healing?
‘Brilliantly moving. A tour de force’ A.S. Byatt
‘A compassionate, witty
and unforgettable masterpiece’
Daily Telegraph
‘At once nostalgic and satiric, a resplendent fable’
Sunday Times
‘Filled with greedy joys, with small pleasures, polished like apples against a sleeve’
Observer
‘The first thing Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha …’
Their distant,
nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign land, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world …
Márquez’s strange pilgrims – the ageing prostitute preparing for death by teaching her dog to weep at her grave, the panicked husband scared for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a
long-haul flight from Paris – experience with all his humour, warmth and colour, what it is to be a Latin American adrift in Europe or, indeed, any outsider living far from home.
‘Celebratory and full of strange relish at life’s oddness. The stories draw their strength from Márquez’s generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent’ William Boyd
‘The most important writer of fiction
in any language’ Bill Clinton
‘Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself’
New Statesman
‘It asks to be read more than twice, and the rewards are dazzling’
Observer
‘Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up
the stagnant time inside …’
As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man laying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their egocentric, maniacally violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea,
can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal?
Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lies have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Márquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality.
‘Delights with its quirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its
total originality’
Vogue
‘Captures perfectly the moral squalor and political paralysis that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long-term dictator’
Guardian
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie