The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Explore the colourful world of a literary legend
To mark the 50th anniversary of ‘ One Hundred Years of Solitude’, Sarah Marshall heads to Colombia to discover what inspired Gabriel García Márquez
After skimming the peeling spines of dusty books crammed into an antique cabinet, Luz Marina Tovar finally plucked a paperback from the shelf. Pages curled by Cartagena’s corrosive Caribbean humidity, it looked much older than its 43 years.
“1974,” she proclaimed, reading the publication date. “It’s not the first edition, but it’s an early one.”
Tovar’s sister, Maria Claudia Sandrock, is a keen traveller who has amassed a collection of more than 100 works by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, with translations in 22 languages. All are on display at the siblings’ hotel, The Alfiz, in Cartagena’s colonial pastel print old town. But this book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a particular favourite.
Chronicling the fortunes and repeated failings suffered by seven generations of the Buendia family, Márquez’s landmark novel delves into the Colombian psyche, exploring an exhilarating passion, blind faith and savage pride that has coloured the South American country to this day.
Historical facts swirl with fantasy in a story where self-destructive characters eat dirt, inbred babies are born with pig tails, and blood from a murdered man crosses streets, climbs curbs and turns corners to reach the victim’s mother.
On May 30, it will be 50 years since the first copies of Marquez’s Nobel Prize-winning book rolled off a printing press in Buenos Aires in 1967. Only the Bible has sold more copies in the Spanish language, and when Márquez died in 2014, aged 87, Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos declared three days of mourning.
Exploring the origins of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a journey through Colombia’s past and present.
Cartagena, where the writer worked as a journalist for the newspaper El Universal, seemed an obvious place to start.
“My books couldn’t have been written if I wasn’t a journalist,” he once told Associated Press in an interview. “Because all my material was taken from reality.”