One Hundred Years of Solitude is "The Bible of Macondo"
One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez's (1927-2014) magnum opus and is recognized as one of the most significant works in the Spanish literary canon. It provoked a literary earthquake in Latin America when it was first published in 1967. It inspired a sense of liberation in the minds of the readers and liberated them from dull realities into a world of magic and fantasy. (Picture Credit- Penguin Books) Harold Bloom, the renowned literary critic, has called One Hundred Years of Solitude as “The Bible of Macondo,” by comparing it to the Book of Genesis in the Bible: "In his subsequent work, Garcia Marquez went back to Faulkner and Kafka; but then, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a miracle and could only happen once, if only because it is less a novel than it is a Scripture, the Bible of Macondo. " (7) Macondo is a picture of the Garden of Eden that is notably discussed in the first chapter of the Old Testament, which is the ...