One Hundred Years of Solitude

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HarperCollins, Mar 25, 1970 - Fiction - 432 pages

A best seller and critical success in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of teh mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. It is a rich and billiant chronicle of life and death and the tragicomedy of man. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendia family one sees all mankind, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo one sees all of Latin America.

Love and lust, war and revolution, reiches and poverty, youth and senility--the variety of life, the endlessness fo death, the search for peace and truth--these, the universal themes, dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Garcia Marquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark fo a master. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettale men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.

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About the author (1970)

Gregory Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York on March 9, 1922. He received a bachelor's degree in romance languages from Dartmouth College. During World War II, he served as a cryptographer. After the war, he received a doctorate from Columbia University and translated Spanish and Portuguese language works for the magazine Odyssey. He taught for over two decades at Columbia University before accepting a position at Queens College. He was a literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English. He would translate a book as he read it for the first time. He translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch, Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral, and Jorge Amado's Captains of the Sand. Rabassa received a National Book Award for Translation in 1967 for his version of Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch. In 2001, Rabassa received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center for contributions to Hispanic literature. In 2006, he received a National Medal of Arts for translations which "continue to enhance our cultural understanding and enrich our lives." He wrote a memoir detailing his experiences as a translator entitled If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents. He died after a brief illness on June 13, 2016 at the age of 94.

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