Reading ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’ As Pandemic Prophecy

Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” includes one of the most famous examples of pandemics in literature, says Álvaro Santana-Acuña, curator of a Márquez exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The story centers around a child who comes to the fictional town of Macondo in the Caribbean, and spreads an illness that infects the entire population. The town enforces a quarantine that “transforms the state of emergency into, like, a natural thing,” Santana-Acuña says.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published in 1967; Santana-Acuña says it became “an instant bestseller” and a “global classic.”

“It’s very difficult to separate the history of literature from narrations on pandemics.”

Gabriel García Márquez and his wife Mercedes Barcha in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1967.

“This fictional story encapsulates many of the things that we have been witnessing with the global spread of COVID-19. And as a result of that, many readers around the world are actually reading ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ as if it were a book of prophecies.”

“There is also another plague, another pandemic that is spreading weekly throughout the world, which is the pandemic of solitude.”

“The same way that we need food and shelter to survive, we also need physical touch.”

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