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Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small publisher, magical style, and setting in a remote Caribbean village were hardly the usual ingredients for success in the literary marketplace. Yet today it ranks among the best-selling books of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it continues to enter the lives of new readers around the world. How did One Hundred Years of Solitude achieve this unlikely success? And what does its trajectory tell us about how a work of art becomes a classic?
Ascent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of One Hundred Years of Solitude , from the moment García Márquez first had the idea for the novel to its global consecration. Using new documents from the author’s archives, Álvaro Santana-Acuña shows how García Márquez wrote the novel, going beyond the many legends that surround it. He unveils the literary ideas and networks that made possible the book’s creation and initial success. Santana-Acuña then follows this novel’s path in more than seventy countries on five continents and explains how thousands of people and organizations have helped it to become a global classic. Shedding new light on the novel’s imagination, production, and reception, Ascent to Glory is an eye-opening book for cultural sociologists and literary historians as well as for fans of García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude .
Ascent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of One Hundred Years of Solitude , from the moment García Márquez first had the idea for the novel to its global consecration. Using new documents from the author’s archives, Álvaro Santana-Acuña shows how García Márquez wrote the novel, going beyond the many legends that surround it. He unveils the literary ideas and networks that made possible the book’s creation and initial success. Santana-Acuña then follows this novel’s path in more than seventy countries on five continents and explains how thousands of people and organizations have helped it to become a global classic. Shedding new light on the novel’s imagination, production, and reception, Ascent to Glory is an eye-opening book for cultural sociologists and literary historians as well as for fans of García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude .
- GenresNonfictionSociology
384 pages, Paperback
First published August 11, 2020
15 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
About the author
Alvaro Santana-Acuña
4 books2 followersA native of the Canary Islands, Álvaro Santana-Acuña is a historian and sociologist. The idea for his newest book "Ascent to Glory" hit him under an umbrella on a very rainy day, when all of a sudden said to himself out loud, "It rains like in Macondo." Little did he suspect that his reaction was the idea for a book that, to complete it, took him ten years and travels to eight countries. "Ascent to Glory" tells the story of the making of one of the best-selling and most beloved novels of all time, "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
Santana-Acuña teaches at Whitman College and the Harvard Summer School. His award-winning sociology and history research has been featured in the BBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, National Public Radio, El País, El Mundo, Radio Nacional de España, La Vie des idées, El Universal, El Espectador. He is a contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times en español, and El País.
Twitter: @santana_alvaro
***
Álvaro Santana-Acuña es un historiador y sociólogo originario de las islas Canarias. La idea para su nuevo libro "Ascent to Glory" le asaltó bajo un paraguas en un día muy lluvioso, cuando de repente se dijo en voz alta: "Llueve como en Macondo". Poco sospechaba que su reacción era la idea para un libro cuya escritura le tomó diez años y viajes a ocho países. "Ascent to Glory" cuenta la historia de la creación de una de las novelas más vendidas y queridas de todos los tiempos, "Cien años de soledad".
Santana-Acuña enseña en Whitman College y en el Harvard Summer School. Su investigación premiada en sociología e historia ha aparecido en BBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, National Public Radio, El País, El Mundo, Radio Nacional de España, La Vie des idées, El Universal, El Espectador. Es colaborador de The New York Times, The New York Times en español y El País.
Twitter: @santana_alvaro
Santana-Acuña teaches at Whitman College and the Harvard Summer School. His award-winning sociology and history research has been featured in the BBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, National Public Radio, El País, El Mundo, Radio Nacional de España, La Vie des idées, El Universal, El Espectador. He is a contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times en español, and El País.
Twitter: @santana_alvaro
***
Álvaro Santana-Acuña es un historiador y sociólogo originario de las islas Canarias. La idea para su nuevo libro "Ascent to Glory" le asaltó bajo un paraguas en un día muy lluvioso, cuando de repente se dijo en voz alta: "Llueve como en Macondo". Poco sospechaba que su reacción era la idea para un libro cuya escritura le tomó diez años y viajes a ocho países. "Ascent to Glory" cuenta la historia de la creación de una de las novelas más vendidas y queridas de todos los tiempos, "Cien años de soledad".
Santana-Acuña enseña en Whitman College y en el Harvard Summer School. Su investigación premiada en sociología e historia ha aparecido en BBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, National Public Radio, El País, El Mundo, Radio Nacional de España, La Vie des idées, El Universal, El Espectador. Es colaborador de The New York Times, The New York Times en español y El País.
Twitter: @santana_alvaro
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 10, 2021
Um estudo sobre a sociogenêse de um clássico que vai acabar virando também um clássico.
January 18, 2022
The 1960s saw the admission of Latin American literature onto the world arena.
It was characterised by the use of magical realism, the formation of naturalistic worlds in which improbable, paranormal events were possible. This literary form absolutely captured the condition of South America at the time, caught between the invasion of modern industrialisation and compelling indigenous traditions in which parable was an alternative reality.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of a small Colombian town, Macondo, and seven generations of the Buendia family, who founded it.
The qualities of muscle and wisdom that established Macondo are diluted in each successive generation, until neither its descendants nor the town are recognisable.
Time comes full circle as the latter disappears and the former revert to an animal state.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez writes convincing descriptions of poverty, for example, but within that squalid world, can a child really be born with a pig’s tail?
Did a priest really levitate? He toys with time, too.
Children grow up quickly, but for adults time stands painfully still, and plagues of insomnia or rainfall may last many years.
The story of how One Hundred Years of Solitude actually came into being is even more fascinating than the legends and myths that surround this novel.
When it was released in 1967, neither the publisher nor the author expected much of it. They knew, as publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf once said, “many a novel is dead the day it is published.”
Yet something unexpected happened. This novel did not die the day of its publication. Instead, it started to live what would prove to be a long life. The story of how this novel about a remote Caribbean town has become the most famous work of Latin American literature and a global classic is spellbinding.
‘Ascent to Glory’ tells this story, using copious new sources, including the ones kept in García Márquez’s personal archives.
The eight-chapter book has been divided into two parts, each containing four chapters.
Part I, entitled, ‘FROM THE IDEA TO THE BOOK’ contains the following chapters –
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, entitled ‘BECOMING A GLOBAL CLASSIC’ contains the following chapters –
5) Controversy, Conflict, Collapse
6) A Novel Without Borders
7) Indexing a Classic
8) Ascent to Glory for Few, Descent to Oblivion for Most
Chapters 1 through 4 cover the years 1920 through 1967. Using rare and new substantiation from the García Márquez archives and libraries in five countries, these chapters examine the four decades prior to the novel’s publication.
They study the ideas, principles, methods, objects, people, and organizations that made One Hundred Years of Solitude imaginable as a work of art in the first place.
When García Márquez was born, the artistic principles of Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism were spreading in Latin America, and years later they compelled him and his contemporaries to imagine and write their works as region-spanning Latin American literature.
These principles were fundamental to imagine his novel but not enough to produce it.
The fate of One Hundred Years of Solitude could have been completely different without the rapid modernization of the Spanish-language book industry in the 1960s. Due to this booming industry, the novel was part of an avalanche of literary works that began in 1962.
Their achievement created a space of imagination, production, and reception; thanks to this space (or niche), One Hundred Years of Solitude easily entered the publishing market five years later as a best seller.
But how did García Márquez actually write the novel?
While struggling to put it on paper for seventeen years, he learned many professional skills and conventions over two decades of traveling in more than ten countries and after joining several groups of artists.
Collaborators in Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain assisted him as he was writing it.
When the novel was published, it became an immediate hit. It was the new product of the modernizing Spanish-language book industry and of the thriving trend known as the New Latin American Novel.
And it was written by a skillful and well-connected Latin American author.
Yet being a best seller guarantees nothing long-term. A work of art, no matter how successful was at first, is not born a classic but rather becomes one.
Chapters 5 through 7 show what happened to One Hundred Years of Solitude over the next six decades, from 1967 to 2020.
These chapters examine data from more than 90 countries and 45 languages to explain its ascent to glory.
For this ascent to happen, scores of cultural brokers had to intervene. They facilitate the circulation of the work of art from one culture, country, and generation to another. These brokers are more than the usual suspects, critics and scholars. They are a broader constellation of people, groups, objects, and organizations quite often unrelated to one another.
Yet their individual actions yield a collective result: the consecration as a classic work of art. Thousands of brokers have done so for One Hundred Years of Solitude.
To further understand how a literary work becomes a classic, chapter 8 studies five literary works that met the conditions to become global classics but did not do so.
Their trajectories show us that the making of a classic work of art is never simply a Newtonian moment but a social story.
In the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude, this story spans over a century and includes millions of readers and thousands of cultural brokers on seven continents, including Antarctica, where a British explorer read the novel during the first circumpolar navigation of the Earth.
More usually, the making of a classic is a social story that can help us understand why it is so difficult to imagine social life without classics.
At its publication in 1967, the book was immediately applauded as the greatest novel in the Spanish language since Don Quixote.
The first English translation was published in 1970, and since then it has topped lists of world literature and received many awards, the highest being the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. Its influence has been widespread. V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, for example, all owe Márquez a debt for outsizing their reality, and ours.
A must read for Marquez lovers.
It was characterised by the use of magical realism, the formation of naturalistic worlds in which improbable, paranormal events were possible. This literary form absolutely captured the condition of South America at the time, caught between the invasion of modern industrialisation and compelling indigenous traditions in which parable was an alternative reality.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of a small Colombian town, Macondo, and seven generations of the Buendia family, who founded it.
The qualities of muscle and wisdom that established Macondo are diluted in each successive generation, until neither its descendants nor the town are recognisable.
Time comes full circle as the latter disappears and the former revert to an animal state.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez writes convincing descriptions of poverty, for example, but within that squalid world, can a child really be born with a pig’s tail?
Did a priest really levitate? He toys with time, too.
Children grow up quickly, but for adults time stands painfully still, and plagues of insomnia or rainfall may last many years.
The story of how One Hundred Years of Solitude actually came into being is even more fascinating than the legends and myths that surround this novel.
When it was released in 1967, neither the publisher nor the author expected much of it. They knew, as publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf once said, “many a novel is dead the day it is published.”
Yet something unexpected happened. This novel did not die the day of its publication. Instead, it started to live what would prove to be a long life. The story of how this novel about a remote Caribbean town has become the most famous work of Latin American literature and a global classic is spellbinding.
‘Ascent to Glory’ tells this story, using copious new sources, including the ones kept in García Márquez’s personal archives.
The eight-chapter book has been divided into two parts, each containing four chapters.
Part I, entitled, ‘FROM THE IDEA TO THE BOOK’ contains the following chapters –
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, entitled ‘BECOMING A GLOBAL CLASSIC’ contains the following chapters –
5) Controversy, Conflict, Collapse
6) A Novel Without Borders
7) Indexing a Classic
8) Ascent to Glory for Few, Descent to Oblivion for Most
Chapters 1 through 4 cover the years 1920 through 1967. Using rare and new substantiation from the García Márquez archives and libraries in five countries, these chapters examine the four decades prior to the novel’s publication.
They study the ideas, principles, methods, objects, people, and organizations that made One Hundred Years of Solitude imaginable as a work of art in the first place.
When García Márquez was born, the artistic principles of Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism were spreading in Latin America, and years later they compelled him and his contemporaries to imagine and write their works as region-spanning Latin American literature.
These principles were fundamental to imagine his novel but not enough to produce it.
The fate of One Hundred Years of Solitude could have been completely different without the rapid modernization of the Spanish-language book industry in the 1960s. Due to this booming industry, the novel was part of an avalanche of literary works that began in 1962.
Their achievement created a space of imagination, production, and reception; thanks to this space (or niche), One Hundred Years of Solitude easily entered the publishing market five years later as a best seller.
But how did García Márquez actually write the novel?
While struggling to put it on paper for seventeen years, he learned many professional skills and conventions over two decades of traveling in more than ten countries and after joining several groups of artists.
Collaborators in Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain assisted him as he was writing it.
When the novel was published, it became an immediate hit. It was the new product of the modernizing Spanish-language book industry and of the thriving trend known as the New Latin American Novel.
And it was written by a skillful and well-connected Latin American author.
Yet being a best seller guarantees nothing long-term. A work of art, no matter how successful was at first, is not born a classic but rather becomes one.
Chapters 5 through 7 show what happened to One Hundred Years of Solitude over the next six decades, from 1967 to 2020.
These chapters examine data from more than 90 countries and 45 languages to explain its ascent to glory.
For this ascent to happen, scores of cultural brokers had to intervene. They facilitate the circulation of the work of art from one culture, country, and generation to another. These brokers are more than the usual suspects, critics and scholars. They are a broader constellation of people, groups, objects, and organizations quite often unrelated to one another.
Yet their individual actions yield a collective result: the consecration as a classic work of art. Thousands of brokers have done so for One Hundred Years of Solitude.
To further understand how a literary work becomes a classic, chapter 8 studies five literary works that met the conditions to become global classics but did not do so.
Their trajectories show us that the making of a classic work of art is never simply a Newtonian moment but a social story.
In the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude, this story spans over a century and includes millions of readers and thousands of cultural brokers on seven continents, including Antarctica, where a British explorer read the novel during the first circumpolar navigation of the Earth.
More usually, the making of a classic is a social story that can help us understand why it is so difficult to imagine social life without classics.
At its publication in 1967, the book was immediately applauded as the greatest novel in the Spanish language since Don Quixote.
The first English translation was published in 1970, and since then it has topped lists of world literature and received many awards, the highest being the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. Its influence has been widespread. V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, for example, all owe Márquez a debt for outsizing their reality, and ours.
A must read for Marquez lovers.
November 28, 2020
The power of networking to create a Classic
Back in the Eighties, when I read for the first time “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, I was so amazed that I thought Gabriel García Márquez must have been struck by some kind of divine inspirational moment to create such a marvelous piece of literature. Since them, I had assumed that this masterpiece was exclusively produced by the mind of the great Colombian writer and I imagined him working alone and secluded in the room of his apartment in Mexico City. It was until I read “Ascent to Glory” that I learned how el Gabo wrote his famous novel assisted by the input and recommendations of the network of his close friends. But I also got to know how earlier novels produced by fellow Latin-American writers used similar themes and story lines to create great novels that did not become nearly as popular as the now classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.
Any aspiring writer should read “Ascent to Glory” to know how important is networking not only to publish a book but also to enrich it with the input of fellow writers, the way García Márquez did.
As a bonus for anybody interested in Latin-American literature, Álvaro Santana-Acuna also provides the names of several books of great value that would help enrich the enjoyable experience of delving into the literature of this interesting region of the World. Thanks to this book I will start reading novels from Alejo Carpentier, José Donoso and José Lezama Lima, among others.
Back in the Eighties, when I read for the first time “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, I was so amazed that I thought Gabriel García Márquez must have been struck by some kind of divine inspirational moment to create such a marvelous piece of literature. Since them, I had assumed that this masterpiece was exclusively produced by the mind of the great Colombian writer and I imagined him working alone and secluded in the room of his apartment in Mexico City. It was until I read “Ascent to Glory” that I learned how el Gabo wrote his famous novel assisted by the input and recommendations of the network of his close friends. But I also got to know how earlier novels produced by fellow Latin-American writers used similar themes and story lines to create great novels that did not become nearly as popular as the now classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.
Any aspiring writer should read “Ascent to Glory” to know how important is networking not only to publish a book but also to enrich it with the input of fellow writers, the way García Márquez did.
As a bonus for anybody interested in Latin-American literature, Álvaro Santana-Acuna also provides the names of several books of great value that would help enrich the enjoyable experience of delving into the literature of this interesting region of the World. Thanks to this book I will start reading novels from Alejo Carpentier, José Donoso and José Lezama Lima, among others.
November 17, 2020
This book is filled with fascinating details and a great topic: what makes a classic? Santana-Acuña shows us that it's not just the quality or originality of the writing, but the combination of a great number of factors: the timing, the economic environment, the support of peers, the approval of gatekeepers, the distribution system, and even the personality of the artist.
The only reason I don't give it five stars is because it's presented in a clumsy manner for academic consumption: each chapter deals with one facet, which requires a lot of repetition of information in every chapter for readers who aren't reading the book as a whole. I wish Santana-Acuña would consider publishing an edition for the general public that follows a more chronological format. Nevertheless, a book well worth reading, even if you find yourself skipping a bit.
The only reason I don't give it five stars is because it's presented in a clumsy manner for academic consumption: each chapter deals with one facet, which requires a lot of repetition of information in every chapter for readers who aren't reading the book as a whole. I wish Santana-Acuña would consider publishing an edition for the general public that follows a more chronological format. Nevertheless, a book well worth reading, even if you find yourself skipping a bit.
December 14, 2023
كتاب مهم ومليء بالمعلومات لكل مهتم بالأدب اللاتيني هو لا يحكي كيف كتب ماركيز مئة عام من العزلة,انما كيف حاك ماركيز الرواية وبمعاونة اصدقاءه في توفير الافكار والأحداث
أيضاً
.ماهو الأسلوب الذي استخدمه وبمن تأثر
يتحدث الكتاب ايضاً أثر الرواية عالمياً وماحدث قبل وبعد اصدار الرواية في المجتمع الأدبي وظهور وبروز الأدب اللاتيني وكتّابه مع ذكر اسماء ومصادر الكتب وتاريخها
أيضاً
.ماهو الأسلوب الذي استخدمه وبمن تأثر
يتحدث الكتاب ايضاً أثر الرواية عالمياً وماحدث قبل وبعد اصدار الرواية في المجتمع الأدبي وظهور وبروز الأدب اللاتيني وكتّابه مع ذكر اسماء ومصادر الكتب وتاريخها
June 8, 2022
In Ascent to Glory, Santana-Acuña has written more than a scholarly kunstlerroman, a portrait of an artist or an artist’s work,. Rather, he has written the arche-story of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Based on extensive, dedicated, and patient research, Santana-Acuña weaves together sources, discourses, and disciplines to tell a macro-level story about the creation of a work, its realization, its dissemination, and continued presence in the world. Gabriel García Márquez is part of this narrative, as is One Hundred Years of Solitude, but Santana-Acuña tells a much deeper and broader story that feels like a highly choreographed crowd scene in an epic movie or the camera work in Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (2002). There is so much in this book to take in, yet Santana-Acuña maintains deft control of his material to realize the argument embedded in the book’s title.
Rather than understand One Hundred Years of Solitude narrowly as a singular work of genius, product of a unique literary genius, Santana-Acuña sees the novel as a collective expression, product of a vast network of collaborators (individuals, groups, institutions) and historical, cultural, and aesthetic forces. Some of this material is well known because of the numerous interviews with García Márquez over the course of his life, his autobiography Living to Tell the Tale (2002), or Gerald Martin’s thorough biography Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (2008), but Santana-Acuña is charting a vaster ground in Ascent to Glory, because he wants to understand One Hundred Years of Solitude can be initially conceived within Colombian regionalism, then through its development and publication become a scion of the New Latin American Novel, then through translation transform into a piece of world literature, and finally to be taken up by non-literary cultural forces to become a global classic. At each stage, the novel breaks from one context–one set of collaborators and collaborations–into a geographically and culturally broader, more networked context with new, more numerous collaborators. It is through this widening arc of cultural power, dissemination, and presence that Santana-Acuña organizes his diverse research and makes sense of his collaborative focus and argument.
Rather than understand One Hundred Years of Solitude narrowly as a singular work of genius, product of a unique literary genius, Santana-Acuña sees the novel as a collective expression, product of a vast network of collaborators (individuals, groups, institutions) and historical, cultural, and aesthetic forces. Some of this material is well known because of the numerous interviews with García Márquez over the course of his life, his autobiography Living to Tell the Tale (2002), or Gerald Martin’s thorough biography Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (2008), but Santana-Acuña is charting a vaster ground in Ascent to Glory, because he wants to understand One Hundred Years of Solitude can be initially conceived within Colombian regionalism, then through its development and publication become a scion of the New Latin American Novel, then through translation transform into a piece of world literature, and finally to be taken up by non-literary cultural forces to become a global classic. At each stage, the novel breaks from one context–one set of collaborators and collaborations–into a geographically and culturally broader, more networked context with new, more numerous collaborators. It is through this widening arc of cultural power, dissemination, and presence that Santana-Acuña organizes his diverse research and makes sense of his collaborative focus and argument.
December 26, 2024
Álvaro is unique as an author and as an academic. Although the world's foremost expert on Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabo), his prose is accessible, interesting and dynamic enough for even the most casual reader's bookshelf. This is a landmark study, novel, and seminal work in the field of Gabriel Garcia Marquez studies - fast-moving and full to the brim of fascinating detail (as Álvaro is in real life himself) about Gabo and Mercedes's life, sociocultural milieu and life's architecture around the book. An unprecedented look into the lead-up, the after-math and the construction and meaning of 100 Years of Solitude, this book paints Gabo's oeuvre in such bright and new hues (you'll never look at yellow roses, butterflies or the color yellow in general in the same light again) that even the biggest fan who's read and re-read Gabo's work will walk away surprised, delighted, and with a new appreciation both for Gabo and Álvaro together.
December 1, 2020
Avec « Ascent to glory » Álvaro Santana-Acuña explore l’univers poétique de l’écrivain colombien Gabriel García Márquez. Son étude montre comment « Cent ans de solitude » est devenu un chef d’œuvre universel. Le chercheur Explore toutes les facettes de cette œuvre intemporelle.
« Ascent to glory » nous permet de voir comment « cent ans solitude » a été construit et comment il reflète la vie caribéenne, la vie colombienne, la vie latino-américaine et la vie au delà des frontières.
Ce livre est le résultat du travail assidu et rigoureux du sociologue, écrivain et professeur espagnol Álvaro Santana-Acuña. En utilisant plusieurs ressources et des documents inédits, l’auteur nous présente une excellente recherche où la sociologie et la littérature se rencontrent.
Un livre à lire absolument! Une invitation au voyage vers le réel merveilleux !
« Ascent to glory » nous permet de voir comment « cent ans solitude » a été construit et comment il reflète la vie caribéenne, la vie colombienne, la vie latino-américaine et la vie au delà des frontières.
Ce livre est le résultat du travail assidu et rigoureux du sociologue, écrivain et professeur espagnol Álvaro Santana-Acuña. En utilisant plusieurs ressources et des documents inédits, l’auteur nous présente une excellente recherche où la sociologie et la littérature se rencontrent.
Un livre à lire absolument! Une invitation au voyage vers le réel merveilleux !
January 7, 2024
This book was good but not what I had expected. This surprised me because it focused mostly on the cultural and social-network that fostered its creation. Unlike other books that I have loved, this did not seek to explain the structure of the book--information that would be most valuable to a writer looking to write their own "Cien años de soledad".
Certainly it was fascinating to learn how long it took to envision the book before a single word was written, and to learn how much García Márquez had workshopped its chapters among his peer writers and other literary critics.
Though this observation should not detract from the fine achievement that is this book--I have to conclude that I still have not read a book that explains the structure of this novel, as a writer would be looking for.
Certainly it was fascinating to learn how long it took to envision the book before a single word was written, and to learn how much García Márquez had workshopped its chapters among his peer writers and other literary critics.
Though this observation should not detract from the fine achievement that is this book--I have to conclude that I still have not read a book that explains the structure of this novel, as a writer would be looking for.
February 23, 2021
Historia, sociología y critica literaria son, sin duda, elementos cruciales para el estudio del libro y en especial para comprenderlos como objetos culturales que pueden llegar a tener una repercusión global dentro y fuera de la literatura. No basta un elemento estético, sino son múltiples las razones que pueden convierten una novela en un clásico global. Santana-Acuña con un lenguaje sencillo que se lee por momentos como una novela y con una estructura teórica clara logra demostrarlo con un clásico global como Cien años de soledad.
December 13, 2024
Cómo es que un libro se vuelve un clásico? El genio, el talento, el trabajo del autor, por supuesto. Pero hace falta mucho más. Las condiciones del mercado, no en uno, sino en varios países. Las redes culturales del autor. Los agentes literarios. Incluso la disponibilidad del papel para imprimir un libro en miles y miles de ejemplares: también eso se necesita. Este es uno de los mejores libros de sociología literaria que he leído. Y ha recibido muy buenas críticas. Esperemos que pronto salga la versión en español.
December 13, 2024
Amazing book!
It is very well written. The author does a really great job here. This book is a must read to understand how García Márquez came up with the idea for his great novel, how he wrote it and why it has become so popular. "Ascent to glory" is super detailed and funny at times. I read this book after reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and I got to understand the novel a lot much better. I'm ready to watch the series now.
It is very well written. The author does a really great job here. This book is a must read to understand how García Márquez came up with the idea for his great novel, how he wrote it and why it has become so popular. "Ascent to glory" is super detailed and funny at times. I read this book after reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and I got to understand the novel a lot much better. I'm ready to watch the series now.
February 11, 2023
A great explanation of cosmopolitanism, the rise of the Spanish publishing industry, the Latin American novel, cultural brokers, and how it all helped "One Hundred Years of Solitude" become what it is known today. Helped me realize why I liked the book so much.
August 26, 2021
Bastante informativo. Muy interesante saber detalles de cómo Cien años de soledad llegó a ser lo que es.
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