One Hundred Years of Solitude, 50 years on

Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal saga was published two days before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, heralding the ‘summer of love’

A rural Colombian epic written in Mexico City and published in Buenos Aires, One Hundred Years of Solitude came out 50 years ago, on 30 May 1967. It didn’t inaugurate Latin America’s literary new wave, also including Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa; but once translated Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal saga – a sexy, quasi-anthropological mixture of fabulous tales, lightly disguised history and seven-generation family soap opera – became the novel that gained “el Boom” recognition in the English-speaking world and shaped how it was perceived.

In a fascinating coincidence, the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released just two days later, on 1 June. As it happens, Merseyside and Macondo – the fictional town featured in the novel – were far from being worlds apart: the Fab Four were moving towards a psychedelic surrealism not unlike magic realism in 1967. The film Magical Mystery Tour came later in the year, while A Hard Day’s Night had been one of the LPs that kept García Márquez company as he wrote his novel.