A NOVEL ADAPTS TO THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
One Hundred Years of Solitude came out during a revolution of the Spanish-language publishing industry. In Spain, this industry had reached an unprecedented publishing peak of literary titles, surpassing the numbers from the United States, coming close to the United Kingdom, and closing the gap with France. Young and relatively unknown Latin American writers were experiencing aesthetic liberation, too. Publishers introduced modern strategies of book marketing. Literary agents were now negotiating better contractual conditions on behalf of their clients. Spanish exiles bridged the publishing gap between Latin America and Spain. The international audience for the New Latin American Novel was growing. And changes in readers’ taste asked for modern-looking and affordable paperbacks. One Hundred Years of Solitude did nothing to upset this new status quo in the publishing industry. In fact, it fully benefited from it and helped to consolidate it.
Before One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez struggled to get his literary work published. He tried publishing it in Spain, Colombia, Mexico, and France, and in different formats: books, literary magazines, and newspapers. Not only did his early literary works circulate poorly, but he also faced harsh contractual conditions like most of his peers in the region. In 1962, Universidad Veracruzana published Big Mama’s Funeral, his first book of short stories. Its production ran into the customary obstacles so characteristic of the region’s publishing industry. By contract, the publisher “acquires the literary property of the manuscript . . . property rights that will stay in place as long as the University has more than one hundred unsold book copies.” The contract stipulated that the publisher could take up to two years to publish his book and that it would be in charge of distribution. Additional proofs of the publisher’s full control over the book were that it “will have, at all times, the right to make new editions of the book by just notifying the Author,” it prohibited him to publish any part of the work elsewhere, and it paid the author no subsidiary rights. These tough contractual conditions soon turned into the typical nightmare for Latin American writers. First, a happy García Márquez informed a friend that the book would have a print run of five thousand copies only to find out later that the contract lowered the amount to two thousand. After its publication, he complained that distribution was terrible: only one hundred and fifty copies were sold half a year later, and he had to distribute the same number among friends and colleagues. Three years later, he was still complaining about the publisher’s handling of the rights and pleaded Sudamericana to help him get the rights back. García Márquez’s sorrows were not over. The book, of course, was pirated. The supplement of Diario del Caribe in Barranquilla published Big Mama’s Funeral in 1964. As usual, he received no royalties.67
The poor circulation of Big Mama’s Funeral and most of his early works had, of course, nothing to do with their aesthetic quality and had all to do with the local and divided publishing industry in the region.68 The truth was that One Hundred Years of Solitude was set to face the same scenario. García Márquez had reached a verbal publishing agreement with Ediciones Era, which had four years earlier released in Mexico new editions of his novellas, No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour. Era’s official policy was to print no more than two thousand copies of new literary titles. More fundamentally, this small, family-owned publishing company lacked a competitive international distribution. For example, its 1963 edition of No One Writes to the Colonel only arrived in Uruguayan bookstores two years later.
If García Márquez had honored the oral agreement with Era for One Hundred Years of Solitude, the publisher would have printed a small print run and used no international distributor. His first novel, which took him seventeen years to write, would most likely have attracted little attention and been framed as a Caribbean story published by a Colombian expat living in Mexico. (It was the same obscurity Cabrera Infante feared that his novel Three Trapped Tigers would face if Joaquín Mortiz had published it, instead of the commercial and regional Sudamericana.) Indeed, no Latin American literary title published by Era in the 1960s became an international best seller and, in the long run, oblivion was the fate of most of its titles. Thus, if Era had released One Hundred Years of Solitude, another book would have occupied its position as the exemplary New Latin American Novel. But, luckily for the desperate writer, Balcells and Sudamericana got involved in the novel’s production.
Balcells’s agency first signed García Márquez in 1962. For the next three years, it only managed the translation rights of his works worldwide. Soon after signing García Márquez, Balcells brokered the writer’s first foreign contract with French publisher René Julliard for No One Writes to the Colonel, for which he received an advance gross payment of twelve hundred French francs, 8 percent in royalties per copy sold, and 50 percent for subsidiary rights. The print run was five thousand copies. The following year, he signed another contract with Julliard for In Evil Hour with similar conditions. In 1964, U.S. publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux were interested in publishing In Evil Hour and asked for an exclusivity agreement to publish The Autumn of the Patriarch (the manuscript García Márquez had been working on before he committed to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude). In 1965, he signed a contract with Italy’s prestigious commercial publisher Feltrinelli for No One Writes to the Colonel and Big Mama’s Funeral. Both had print runs of five thousand copies. He received a combined advance gross payment of two hundred and fifty thousand lire, plus 8 percent in royalties per copy sold, and 50 percent for subsidiary rights.
The summer of 1965, Balcells traveled from Spain to the United States and Latin America to sign new clients and make more deals with publishers across the Atlantic. García Márquez signed a new contract with the agency. (As mentioned Catalan Luis Vicens, a Spanish exile and friend from Colombia, was present at the signing.) The agency now represented him in all languages, including the booming Spanish-language book market. This was great news for an author who had been seeking to become a professional writer for two decades. After signing the new contract, a cascade of publishing contracts followed. When he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, he signed contracts to publish his works in new four countries: the United States, the Netherlands, Romania, and Germany. As months of writing passed, one contract after another added to his belief that he could finally complete his first novel and become a full-time professional writer.69
How and why did Sudamericana approach García Márquez? Acquisitions editor Porrúa reportedly first heard about him after receiving Luis Harss’s manuscript of Into the Mainstream, which the company published in 1966. In this volume, “[García Márquez] was next to Borges, Rulfo, Onetti, Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and other great writers,” Porrúa said. “That is why the first thing that came to my mind was, who is he?” Harss also gave to Porrúa copies of No One Writes to the Colonel and Big Mama’s Funeral. The acquisitions editor wrote García Márquez right away. “The advantage I had over [Seix] Barral with García Márquez,” Porrúa recalled, “is that I could read everything he had published before I contacted him. Thus, I expected something exceptional when he replied that the rights for his previous works were committed, but that he could send me a novel he was writing.” This novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the contact that Porrúa referred to happened the fall of 1965, under Balcells’s brokerage. Once Sudamericana agreed to publish his next novel, “[García Márquez] forgot about Era, telling us,” as one of its editors recalled, “that it was too small for the expectations he had placed on the novel.” Publishing One Hundred Years of Solitude as a New Latin American Novel with Sudamericana instead ensured prestige and international sales. For the writer, this was a life-changing professional step. “García Márquez told me,” critic T. E. Martínez wrote, “that, when he received the letter of acceptance from Sudamericana, he regarded it as a command, as an order of destiny. Something that definitely marked in his life a before and after.”70
Why