García Márquez and the manuscript sent in halves

Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. He was raised by his grandparents, listening to stories that would later become Macondo. Before he was a novelist, he was a journalist, and he spent much of his youth without money.

The no

In February 1952, the young García Márquez received a letter from Guillermo de Torre, who headed the editorial board of the publisher Losada, in Buenos Aires. The novel he had sent, Leaf Storm (La hojarasca), had been rejected. And the letter, according to the accounts, suggested he look for another trade. His friends in the Barranquilla Group helped him not to give up. The book came out in 1955, from another publisher.

The second no was money. In the mid-1960s, living in Mexico City, García Márquez spent more than a year writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. The family lived on loans and on what his wife, Mercedes Barcha, managed to stretch. When the novel was finished, the two went to the post office to send the original to Editorial Sudamericana, in Buenos Aires. The money was only enough to send half. The story goes that they went home, pawned the last appliances they had, a hair dryer, a heater and a blender, and went back to the post office to send the rest.

What they did

One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in Buenos Aires in May 1967. It became one of the most read novels in the Spanish language and a landmark of magical realism. In 1982, García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 2002, he published his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale, with an epigraph saying that life is not what one lived, but what one remembers, and how one remembers it in order to tell it.

What this has to do with Bairo

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was also born in Colombia. García Márquez's story is that of a Colombian who heard a no from a foreign editor and, years later, mailed in halves the book that changed the continent's literature.

The most beautiful point in common is in the epigraph. In Bairo's story, there's a moment when he, after a spiritual search, asks for wisdom and courage to remember how to reach his best version, not to learn it. For him, he had already seen the end; what was missing was building the middle. It's in The God of the impossible.

Bairo doesn't compare himself to the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He pays tribute to a fellow countryman who proved that an editor's no isn't the last word on anyone.

Read also: Capoeira was the bridge, about the Colombian boy who said that one day he would live in Brazil.

Sources

• Infobae, "La historia del manuscrito de 'Cien años de soledad'" (Spanish): https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2019/03/17/la-historia-del-manuscrito-de-cien-anos-de-soledad-que-se-creia-perdido-y-aparecio-en-mexico/
• Argentina's Ministry of Culture, "Escribió, vendió sus electrodomésticos y ganó el Nobel" (Spanish): https://www.cultura.gob.ar/empeno-sus-electrodomesticos-y-gano-el-nobel-la-historia-detras-de-cien-anos-de-soledad_3799/
• Infobae, on Guillermo de Torre's rejection letter (Spanish): https://www.infobae.com/leamos/2024/01/04/george-orwell-sylvia-plath-y-garcia-marquez-de-las-crueles-cartas-de-rechazo-editorial-no-se-salvan-ni-los-mejores-autores/
• Centro Gabo, on the dedications and La hojarasca (Spanish): https://centrogabo.org/las-dedicatorias-en-los-libros-de-gabriel-garcia-marquez-historias-de-amores-y-amistades
• Nobel Prize, Gabriel García Márquez (1982): https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/facts/