Macondo Magic and Other Blessings

By Suzanne Adam

The death of Gabriel García Márquez prompted me to reread his Nobel-winning One Hundred Years of Solitude,“Cien Años de Soledad” in Spanish—the epic novel, which traces the Buendía family over one hundred years. I’d read it in English long ago while a student in Berkeley, not knowing then that soon I’d be living as a Peace Corps volunteer not far from Márquez’s childhood town of Aracataca, which in his imagination became the mythical town of Macondo. Rereading the novel now fifty years after my Peace Corps posting in Barranquilla, Colombia, García Márquez’s wild, extravagant...