We start Season 2 with a boom – the Latin American Boom, that is – by reading Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad / One Hundred Years of Solitude! This book gives a glimpse into an important moment for Latin American literature and world literature. And it does that by telling the story of a single family across several generations. We get to know the members of the Buendía family and follow their lives in the Colombian village of Macondo, until the village and the family both come to an end. Before they do, however, magic intersects with modernization, and community with solitude, for just over one hundred years.
This week it was our great pleasure to hear from two more guests. The extended reflection was provided by Professor Ilan Stavans, who is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is also the Publisher of Restless Books. Then, we interviewed Professor Philip Swanson, who is the Hughes Professor of Spanish at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely on Latin American literature, especially the New Narrative of the Latin American Boom and Post-Boom.
Special thanks to Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón for reading the opening lines of the novel in Spanish and English at the start of the episode.
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Sources
Elie, Paul. “The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Vanity Fair, 9 Dec. 2015, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/12/gabriel-garcia-marquez-one-hundred-years-of-solitude-history.
García Márquez, Gabriel. “Nobel Lecture: The Solitude of Latin America.” The Nobel Prize, 8 Dec. 1982, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/.
García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Harper Perennial, 2006. Modern Classics Edition.
Marling, Philip. Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Santana-Acuña, Álvaro. “How Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude became a classic.” Ransom Center Magazine, 30 May 2020, https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2020/05/30/ascent-to-glory-how-gabos-masterpiece-became-a-classic/.