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Gabriel García Márquez gave up paid work and spent about 18 months writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, finishing in 1966. His wife, Mercedes Barcha, kept the family going by pawning what they owned, and they reportedly had to pawn a heater and a hair dryer to post the last part of the manuscript to the publisher in Buenos Aires.

Gabriel García Márquez

Literature

The story behind the card

By the mid-1960s García Márquez was a Colombian journalist and screenwriter living in Mexico City who had long wanted to write a novel about his grandparents' world. He later said the opening came to him in 1965 on a drive to Acapulco, and he turned the car around to start writing. The book follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the invented town of Macondo, telling fantastic events in the same calm voice as everyday ones, a style critics call magical realism. Published in Buenos Aires in 1967, it has sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages, and García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Türkçe oku
Gabriel García Márquez işini bırakıp yaklaşık 18 ay boyunca Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık'ı yazdı ve romanı 1966'da bitirdi. Eşi Mercedes Barcha bu sürede evi, ellerindeki eşyaları rehin bırakarak geçindirdi; anlatılanlara göre romanın son bölümünü Buenos Aires'teki yayınevine postalayabilmek için bir ısıtıcıyla bir saç kurutma makinesini de rehin vermek zorunda kaldılar.

García Márquez, 1960'ların ortasında Meksiko'da yaşayan Kolombiyalı bir gazeteci ve senaristti; büyükanne ve büyükbabasının dünyasını anlatan bir roman yazmayı uzun zamandır istiyordu. Sonradan anlattığına göre, 1965'te Acapulco'ya giderken romanın başı birden aklına geldi ve arabayı geri çevirip yazmaya oturdu. Kitap, uydurma bir kasaba olan Macondo'da Buendía ailesinin yedi kuşağını anlatır; olağanüstü olayları gündelik olaylarla aynı sakin sesle aktarır. Eleştirmenler bu üsluba büyülü gerçekçilik der. 1967'de Buenos Aires'te yayımlanan roman onlarca dile çevrildi ve on milyonlarca adet satıldı; García Márquez 1982'de Nobel Edebiyat Ödülü'nü aldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: One Hundred Years of Solitude
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