Twenty One Hundred Years of Solitudes
(I’m always searching for new One Hundred Years of Solitudes: ambitious, often sprawling novels that fold reality together with fantasy to reveal the social, cultural, historical, and political rootwork of their particular settings. One Hundred Years of Solitude is surely the representative novel of this type, even if a few of my favorite One Hundred Years of Solitudes preceded One Hundred Years of Solitude itself. Some countries seem not to have produced a One Hundred Years of Solitude—or more likely they have, but I haven’t discovered them—while others boast writers who have generated their One Hundred Years of Solitudes over multiple books rather than one. I think of José Saramago, for instance, as something like the Portuguese Márquez, yet none of his novels is or attempts to be a One Hundred Years of Solitude. (The Stone Raft comes the closest, but I find it less accessible than the books I regard as his masterpieces.) Similarly, Calvino is surely Italy’s Márquez, Borges surely Argentina’s, but it’s their body of work that reveals their accomplishments, rather than any one book. As for American literature, I’ve simply read too much of it to narrow the field down to a single One Hundred Years of Solitude—or perhaps the country is too diverse to have produced one. Either way, when it comes to the U.S., I’ve selected a few novels that might serve as the One Hundred Years of Solitudes for particular states or cities rather than a single One Hundred Years of Solitude for the nation as a whole. Here, then, are twenty of the One Hundred Years of Solitudes whose achievements I’ve most admired, arranged alphabetically by country.)
Australia: Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan
Brazil: The Centaur in the Garden by Moacyr Scliar
Chile: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
China: Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge
Columbia: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Czech Republic: Empty Streets by Michal Ajvaz
England: Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
Germany: The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Hungary: Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
India: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Japan: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Kenya: Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Mexico: Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa
Nigeria: The Famished Road by Ben Okri
U.S.A., Arkansas: The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by Donald Harington
U.S.A., Manhattan: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
U.S.A., New Mexico: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
U.S.A., Suburbia: Duplex by Kathryn Davis
U.S.S.R.: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Vietnam: She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan Barry
(Addendum: The as-yet-unpublished novel Things They Lost by the Kenyan writer Okwiri Oduor will absolutely demand a place on this list whenever it reaches print; and Louis de Bernières’s Latin American Trilogy—The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman—while a cabinet of wonders, and very much in the tradition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is set in an unnamed Latin American country that most closely resembles Columbia, which, of course, someone else already had dibs on.)
— February 20, 2021