soopastryheart

I remember first reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the summer before my junior year of high school, on the campus of Duke University while attending a summer camp for young writers (yes, I was this geeky). I bought it from the school’s bookstore on the second day, as a group of girls on my floor were talking about it, raving, about how the writing was so beautiful. I had never heard of Gabriel García Márquez, but I didn’t want to let anyone know. I was out of my element, as the other kids at camp were from nationally ranked private and boarding schools, with curriculums that later made my freshman year of college look like a joke. I remember trying to find shaded areas to lie under, to save myself from the sweltering heat and humidity that I was unaccustomed to as a Pacific Northwesterner. I remember finding some passages so longwinded that I’d have to reread over and over to understand. It took me the entire duration of camp, two whopping weeks, to muddle through the book.

I think it was my sophomore or junior year of college that the book was assigned as part of an English class. I don’t know if it was maturity or the depth in which we discussed the story, but I completely fell in love with the book, appreciating the style of writing on a whole different level than I had before as a teen. Even after the quarter ended, I devoured his other works, but found myself coming back to One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I have reread the book at least a half dozen times since that summer in Durham, all at different stages of maturity and experience. I find something new each time: certain passages will affect me when it hadn’t before, or I’ll pick up on metaphors I hadn’t noticed, or I’ll interpret a scene or character in a different way. I guess that’s the sign of a brilliance of a writer: the ability to have your words be relevant at every stage of your reader’s life, as opposed to one. And that’s what Gabriel García Márquez has left to the rest of the world. Tomorrow, a 16-year-old will pick up his book, the same time a 30, 50, 70-year-old does. And each of them will find a profoundly different meaning within his words. It’s a pretty incredible feat, to have your words grow with the reader. As a writer, that’s the legacy you want to leave the earth with. You want your words to transcend the pages it’s printed on. Long past best-seller lists, long past critical acclaims and accolades, and longer past death.

“Before reading the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

– excerpt from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez