Imogen West-Knights in Slate:
One Hundred Years of Solitude has a near-mythical status for me that no other book does. Aged about 14, bored one day during the summer holidays, I found the Picador 1978 paperback edition on my parents’ bookshelf. I opened it on a whim, and read one of the most iconic first sentences in existence: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” I immediately sat down on the sofa and read for a further three hours. I date my life as a reader of literature to that afternoon, to that first sentence which I still know by heart. I have since reread it only once, 10 years later, because I wanted to wait until I had forgotten what happens. I’ll read it again as soon as the details have once more faded from my memory, and I can’t wait.
If you’ve not read it (and I appreciate that this is one of the most famous books in the world, but just in case), Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel follows six generations of a sprawling family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. I read it before I knew what magical realism was, the genre García Márquez became a figurehead for, and it blew my head off. How could this be? It was so compellingly strange. Along the way, babies are born with pig tails, a single trail of blood makes its way all the way across town to announce someone’s death, a rainstorm lasts almost five years, someone literally ascends to heaven, ghosts and spirits abound.
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