One Hundred Years of Solitude.

GARCIA MARQUEZ, Gabriel.

Item Number: 3069

New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

First American edition of the author’s magnum opus. Octavo, original green cloth with gilt lettering to the spine. Fine in a very near fine first issue price-clipped dust jacket with only light wear to the extremities. Inscribed and dated by Garcia Marquez on the dedication page. Inscribed by Bill Clinton on the half-title page, “For a fellow Yalie Bill Clinton”. Also signed by the translator Gregory Rabassa. One Hundred Years of Solitude was declared Clinton’s favorite novel. He recalls “I read it in my third year of Yale Law School and I literally couldn’t put it down,” Clinton said “My corporate law professor saw me reading that book and he thought I was three bricks shy of a full load. It was the first book in the style of “magical realism” that Clinton said that he could fully fathom. From the book “I learned a lot about dreaming and family history. I believe he’s the most important writer of fiction in any language since William Faulkner died” (William J. Clinton). Housed in a custom quarter morocco clamshell box. An exceptional copy of this landmark novel, seldom found inscribed.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the life of Macondo, a fictional town based in part of Garcia Marquez's hometown of Aracataca, Columbia, and seven generations of the founding family, the Buendias. He creates a complex world with characters and events that display the full range of human experience. For the reader, the pleasure of the novel derives from its fast-paced narrative, humor, vivid characters, and fantasy elements. In this 'magic realism', the author combines imaginative flights of fancy with social realism to give us images of levitating priests, flying carpets, a four-year-long rainstorm, and a young woman ascending to heaven while folding sheets" (NYPL Books of the Century 31).