Ascent to Glory. Álvaro Santana-Acuña

      Columbia University Press

       Publishers Since 1893

      New York Chichester, West Sussex

       cup.columbia.edu

      Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press

      All rights reserved

      E-ISBN 978-0-231-54543-3

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Santana-Acuña, Álvaro, author.

      Title: Ascent to glory : how One hundred years of solitude was written and became a global classic / Álvaro Santana-Acuña.

      Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019056923 (print) | LCCN 2019056924 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231184328 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231184335 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231545433 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927-2014. Cien años de soledad.

      Classification: LCC PQ8180.17.A73 C5377 2020 (print) | LCC PQ8180.17.A73 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056923

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056924

      A Columbia University Press E-book.

      CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

      Cover design: Lisa Hamm

      Canary shape: detail from “Gabriel García Márquez” by Wolf Gang, CC BY-SA 2.0.

      House shape: detail from first page of typescript of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1966), Harry Ransom Center.

      Tree shape: detail from Vicente Rojo’s cover for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

      Butterfly shape: detail from cover of first edition of Leaf Storm (1955).

       To Félix Álvaro Acuña Dorta

       &

       María Teresa Bennasar González

      CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I FROM THE IDEA TO THE BOOK

1 Imagining a Work of Art

2 The Publishing Industry Modernizes

3 A Novel in Search of an Author

       4 Networked Creativity and the Making of a Work of Art

       PART II BECOMING A GLOBAL CLASSIC

       5 Controversy, Conflict, Collapse

       6 A Novel Without Borders

       7 Indexing a Classic

       8 Ascent to Glory for Few, Descent to Oblivion for Most

       Conclusion

       Appendix: Why and How to Study Classics?

       Acknowledgments

       Notes

       References

       Index

INTRODUCTION

      In the summer of 1965, an unknown writer was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two children when, suddenly, a cow crossed the road in front of his car. He stopped abruptly. What happened next was a Newtonian moment, a miracle of the imagination. Right there on the road, in a stroke of brilliant insight, the writer came up with the first sentence of a novel that would change world literature: “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.” Knowing there was not a second to lose, he turned his car around and rushed back home to Mexico City. He quit his job and locked himself up in his studio until he finished the novel. Debts skyrocketed as he spent months writing. He fell behind on rent payments, lived on the generosity of his friends and neighbors, and ended up pawning his car, his wife’s dowry jewels, and even his typewriter. Nothing could stop him. Eighteen months later, he emerged from his studio with a completed manuscript. When he went to the post office to mail it to a possible publisher in Argentina, the bankrupt writer realized that he did not have enough money to send the whole manuscript. He had to divide it into two parts and mailed only one part. When he arrived home, he looked at the pages in his hands and discovered his mistake: he had just mailed the second part of the manuscript, not the first as he had intended. What a terrible way, he might have thought, of pitching the novel that took him so much effort to write! Luckily, the pages that he sent astonished the publisher, who knew that the novel would be a great success and hurried to offer the writer a publishing contract. The writer was Gabriel García Márquez and the novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad).¹

      This story about how this Colombian author created One Hundred Years of Solitude is in reality a fascinating legend, now passed on from generation to generation. Parts of this legend are true and other parts are not, like Isaac Newton’s story about discovering the theory of gravity after an apple fell on his head. What is remarkable about these cases is how legends often find in the pages of famous books and in the minds of people the most fertile soil to take root and grow. Shared and reinvented again and again, legends eventually become myths. One such myth refers to the artist who, after a stroke

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