Cien Anos de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] by MARQUEZ, Gabriel Garcia - 1967

1967. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1967. 8vo., paperback wrappers, pp. [vii], 10-351, [i]; lacking the front free endpaper, binding creased and used, but still in very good condition, some light chipping to the spine ends, and small stains to the lower cover; scarce. First edition, one of just 8,000 copies, in the original Spanish. One Hundred Years of Solitude is often considered to be Marquez' masterpiece. Along with Love in the time of Cholera, it was certainly a seminal work which set the stage for his 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. However, when it was published in the late 1960s, it was not considered to be particularly groundbreaking. In fact, Marquez' previous two books had sold fewer than 2500 copies in total, and the response to this work was somewhat overwhelming for both the author, and his publisher. The story tells the tale of seven generations of the Buendía family, but the plot also covers one hundred years of turbulent Latin American history, from the postcolonial 1820s to the 1920s. In his magic realist style - a style which was, at the time, just beginning to come to the fore in Latin American literature - Marquez combined "imaginative flights of fancy with social realism to give us images of levitating priests, flying carpets, a four-year-long rainstorm, and a young woman ascending to heaven while folding sheets." The book appeared in English in 1970, and since its initial publication has been translated into 46 languages. It has sold more than 50 million copies.