Hi 
I've always been a voracious reader. At first, I thought it was going to be difficult to find a book to choose from all those that had passed through my hands. But I have to say that it took me no more than a minute's thought to work out which was the most special of all the books that had made a lasting impression on me. It was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book that was an obvious choice. It's a classic for a good reason : it's simply brilliant in so many ways.
Picture that I took just today in Paris
At the time I discovered this book in my parents' rather extensive bookshelves, I was 13 years old and going through a fairly acute phase of depression, due as much to family problems as to the questioning of early adolescence. I was asking myself all sorts of big metaphysical questions, and as reading is an activity that requires solitude, I also had a lot of time to ask myself these questions and continue these reflections.
The story, which you may already know, is about the Buendia family in an unnamed country in South America - probably the author's country of origin. We are at the dawn of modernity, which is moving from the cities towards the mountains and the remotest corners of the countryside. At one point, a child accompanies his grandfather to fetch native ice for refrigerating food. A few years later, the first fridges arrive.
As the title suggests, this family's story spans a century. So there are many generations in succession, with uncles, aunts and all the cousins crossing paths and having adventures. That alone is brilliant.
But what struck me most was the way time is stretched out, like concentric loops or circles on the water of time, intersecting at pivotal moments. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is also known as one of the leading authors of magic realism, a movement that brings magic into fiction. Strange and fantastic things happen over and over again, but we are still in a realistic setting and not in a fantasy or a fairytale. The story is so full and so full of events that I couldn't really tell you more here... or I'd go over the 800-word limit ^^ !
But let's go back to the context of my life when I read this book and what it changed in me. On the one hand, this was a very special moment in my life, because in this book I found answers to the very questions I was asking myself. But if that's all it took... To tell you the truth, I already knew that I loved books and stories, but this one in particular had a totally more powerful and lasting effect, the effects of which are still very much alive and well in me.
In fact, that's when I started writing, and since then I've been writing all kinds of texts, from short essays to poems, and more recently, several novels and short stories. In fact, I'm in the process of starting a new novel, and a few days before I came across your article, I was thinking about that book and thinking that I'd like to read it again... I didn't count, but I must have read it four or five times already !
Here's the mark this book has left on me, it's in a way the original book for me, the one that made me want to continue reading them of course, but more than that, to confront myself with the fact of writing them with all the pleasure and discipline that implies ! I plan to write a slightly longer article that will go into more detail about this particular story.
I can't thank you enough for this initiative, I think it has a very special meaning for me at this particular time to talk about this book. Thanks again and see you soon !
Oh, and here's the quote :
"Thus they continued to live in an elusive reality, momentarily held captive by words, but which would inevitably escape them without return once they forgot the very meaning of writing."
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