Críticas Magazine

Adriana V. Lopez

100 Years of Solitude for Kids
July 31, 2008

I´m traveling in Gabriel García Márquez  land at the moment and came across a piece of publishing news in the op-ed section of Colombia´s El Espectador newspaper. The columnist Patricia Lara Salive announced that a children´s version of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) with the precise title, Versión infantil y juvenil de Cien Años de Soledad, is getting ready to find itself a publisher. And since we know Gabo is probably not interested in the task of truncating and illustrating the book for which he already earned the Nobel decades ago, you can assume correctly that he´s allowing a member of his family to take on the challenge. The man behind the project is José Stévenson, the great grandson of Coronel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, García Márquez´s legendary grandfather for whom he based the character Coronel Aureliano Buendía. Stévenson (who also goes by the name of Pepe, as most boys with the name José do)  is a writer, a professor of history, and a publicist. He first came up with the idea in the 90´s when he was chatting with his cousin Gabo at family gathering. Both he and García Márquez agreed that it was a good way to expose and bring young readers to the original book. His first attempt at summarizing the book´s text ended up too disjointed in the narrative. So Stévenson decided to illustrate the book with water colored images of significant chunks of passages of the book. For instance, you´ll see an image of Aureliano Buendía in front of the firing squad remembering the afternoon that his father brought him to first see ice; or Úrsula Iguarán following the trail of blood that would take her past the granary, through the begonias, until she finds the dead body of her husband José Arcadio:

“Siguió en línea recta por la calle, y dobló luego a la derecha y a la izquierda (…) y salió a la plaza y se metió por la puerta de una casa donde no había estado nunca (…) y encontró a José Arcadio tirado boca abajo (…) y vio el cabo original del hilo de sangre que ya había dejado de fluir.”

Lara Salive said that Stévenson had not signed with a publisher yet, hoping a large publisher would bite on the project so that the book could get a wide distribution.

More word on this when we have it. Over and out from Macondo´s Locombia.

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Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on July 31, 2008 | Comments (0)