#5 Greatest Book of All Time

Gabriel Garcia Márquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude is #5 on the History of Literature's list of the 25 Greatest Books of All Time. In Episode 758, Jacke takes a look at this novel, which received global praise and recognition upon its publication in 1967. The novel's opening lines sets the stage for its generational sweep and world-building magical realism. 

Many years later as he faced the firing squad. Colonel Aureliano Buendfa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1982), Márquez spoke of his work and its place in the history of literature:

Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.