this small, family-owned publishing company lacked a competitive international distribution. For example, its 1963 edition of No One Writes to the Colonel only arrived in Uruguayan bookstores two years later.
If García Márquez had honored the oral agreement with Era for One Hundred Years of Solitude, the publisher would have printed a small print run and used no international distributor. His first novel, which took him seventeen years to write, would most likely have attracted little attention and been framed as a Caribbean story published by a Colombian expat living in Mexico. (It was the same obscurity Cabrera Infante feared that his novel Three Trapped Tigers would face if Joaquín Mortiz had published it, instead of the commercial and regional Sudamericana.) Indeed, no Latin American literary title published by Era in the 1960s became an international best seller and, in the long run, oblivion was the fate of most of its titles. Thus, if Era had released One Hundred Years of Solitude, another book would have occupied its position as the exemplary New Latin American Novel. But, luckily for the desperate writer, Balcells and Sudamericana got involved in the novel’s production.
Balcells’s agency first signed García Márquez in 1962. For the next three years, it only managed the translation rights of his works worldwide. Soon after signing García Márquez, Balcells brokered the writer’s first foreign contract with French publisher René Julliard for No One Writes to the Colonel, for which he received an advance gross payment of twelve hundred French francs, 8 percent in royalties per copy sold, and 50 percent for subsidiary rights. The print run was five thousand copies. The following year, he signed another contract with Julliard for In Evil Hour with similar conditions. In 1964, U.S. publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux were interested in publishing In Evil Hour and asked for an exclusivity agreement to publish The Autumn of the Patriarch (the manuscript García Márquez had been working on before he committed to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude). In 1965, he signed a contract with Italy’s prestigious commercial publisher Feltrinelli for No One Writes to the Colonel and Big Mama’s Funeral. Both had print runs of five thousand copies. He received a combined advance gross payment of two hundred and fifty thousand lire, plus 8 percent in royalties per copy sold, and 50 percent for subsidiary rights.
The summer of 1965, Balcells traveled from Spain to the United States and Latin America to sign new clients and make more deals with publishers across the Atlantic. García Márquez signed a new contract with the agency. (As mentioned Catalan Luis Vicens, a Spanish exile and friend from Colombia, was present at the signing.) The agency now represented him in all languages, including the booming Spanish-language book market. This was great news for an author who had been seeking to become a professional writer for two decades. After signing the new contract, a cascade of publishing contracts followed. When he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, he signed contracts to publish his works in new four countries: the United States, the Netherlands, Romania, and Germany. As months of writing passed, one contract after another added to his belief that he could finally complete his first novel and become a full-time professional writer.69
How and why did Sudamericana approach García Márquez? Acquisitions editor Porrúa reportedly first heard about him after receiving Luis Harss’s manuscript of Into the Mainstream, which the company published in 1966. In this volume, “[García Márquez] was next to Borges, Rulfo, Onetti, Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and other great writers,” Porrúa said. “That is why the first thing that came to my mind was, who is he?” Harss also gave to Porrúa copies of No One Writes to the Colonel and Big Mama’s Funeral. The acquisitions editor wrote García Márquez right away. “The advantage I had over [Seix] Barral with García Márquez,” Porrúa recalled, “is that I could read everything he had published before I contacted him. Thus, I expected something exceptional when he replied that the rights for his previous works were committed, but that he could send me a novel he was writing.” This novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the contact that Porrúa referred to happened the fall of 1965, under Balcells’s brokerage. Once Sudamericana agreed to publish his next novel, “[García Márquez] forgot about Era, telling us,” as one of its editors recalled, “that it was too small for the expectations he had placed on the novel.” Publishing One Hundred Years of Solitude as a New Latin American Novel with Sudamericana instead ensured prestige and international sales. For the writer, this was a life-changing professional step. “García Márquez told me,” critic T. E. Martínez wrote, “that, when he received the letter of acceptance from Sudamericana, he regarded it as a command, as an order of destiny. Something that definitely marked in his life a before and after.”70
Why did Porrúa react so positively to a novel he had not even seen? Simply put, García Márquez’s novel adapted to the gatekeeper’s taste. Porrúa was an enthusiast and publisher of books of chronicles, science fiction, and fantasy literature. The themes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the chronicle of a family saga with fantastic events, complied with Porrúa’s literary agenda. He had already published the chronicles and neo-fantastic fiction of Cortázar, whose novel Hopscotch became a best seller, Durrel’s The Alexandria Quartet, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and several works of Latin American writer Onetti. Thus, contrary to the legend of a bankrupt García Márquez sending the manuscript to a tentative publisher and betting everything on it, Porrúa knew it was coming his way for a year. He did not blindly take a chance with One Hundred Years of Solitude.71
There is not enough evidence to fully explain why Seix Barral did not publish this novel, especially since Balcells was aware of the publisher’s promotion of Latin American writers. García Márquez certainly offered the novel to Seix Barral. In a letter to Fuentes in November 1965, García Márquez asked for his advice: Should he opt for Sudamericana or Barral? Fuentes had no doubts: Barral. “Sudamericana,” he explained to García Márquez, “puts your work to circulate only in the Latin American world . . . with Barral you have already made your way to translations and presence in Europe and the United States.” García Márquez asked for Fuentes’s recommendation because he was already in conversations with both publishers and wanted to make the best decision. But Seix Barral finally declined to publish it. According to Carlos Barral, he did so “because of a misunderstanding. I did not answer a telegram punctually, and neither because of an editorial error nor because of a clumsy reading of the manuscript—which I never saw—as has been maliciously claimed.”72
This statement agrees with the available evidence. In the fall of 1965 and under Balcells’s watch, Barral probably received a telegram or letter from García Márquez offering One Hundred Years of Solitude to him. So, the writer approached Barral—as he did with Sudamericana—when he had just started the novel, not with a full manuscript in hand. In October, he was already talking with Barral. But that ceased by February 1966, the same month he asked Fuentes to send three chapters of the book to Sudamericana (after first giving them to Fuentes to know his opinion). Nowhere in this or other letters did García Márquez mention anything else about conversations with Seix Barral. By then, Sudamericana was his preferred publisher. Why? García Márquez was not only interested in finding a publisher for his novel in progress. He wanted to sign with one publisher that could reunite all his books, currently scattered among local publishers. Sudamericana accepted this condition by March 1966. Indeed, two months before, Guillermo Schavelzon, acquisitions editor of the Argentine publisher Jorge Álvarez, traveled to Mexico City. Looking for new clients, he met with García Márquez, who told Schavelzon that he was working on a “long-term project.” The writer offered Schavelzon the rights of Big Mama’s Funeral. They signed a publishing agreement. But sometime in March, the writer asked Jorge Álvarez to cancel the agreement. He had already reached a better deal with Sudamericana, which would publish all his works, including One Hundred Years of Solitude. Thus, this evidence suggests that the novel was not finished when Sudamericana decided to publish it. And Barral’s practice, moreover, was to look at full manuscripts, not book proposals or advance chapters. More fundamentally, in terms of aesthetics and commercial impact, Barral did not know García Márquez’s work that well in 1966. (His wife, Yvonne Hortet, who was a literary agent, apparently did.) And
