I insisted at the beginning of this book on the Latin American context of One Hundred Years of Solitude, its engagement with a particular mingling of despair and possibility. And indeed I think it likely that the immense popularity of the book in its original language – it is said to have sold more copies than any book in Spanish since Don Quixote – has a great deal to do with the image of themselves it offered to Latin Americans: not so much a portrait of solitude as a portrait of the style and grace with which solitude has been and is borne. For the first time, perhaps, Latin Americans read a book that talked the way they talked (or wished they talked) when they were at their wittiest, most stubborn and most stoic. They didn't miss Aureliano's smile.

It would be, and has been, easy to sentimentalize this smile, and by implication to over-romanticize solitude, as long as one is not reading too carefully. There is a lot of anger in the book, as I have tried to show. It is a discreet anger, not at all noisy; but pretty powerful all the same. The story of the novel is the story of life inside the cage of an ail-too enchanting myth.

But if we move our perspective a little, think of One Hundred Years of Solitude as read in translation, in any one of twenty-seven languages, or indeed read in Spanish in North America, say, or in Spain, the picture lightens considerably.