Malcolm Otero perfectly remembers the day he asked Gabriel García Márquez what had happened years ago with his grandfather, Carlos Barral, and with One Hundred Years of Solitude. To him, it was important. He had been listening to countless versions for years and almost all of them concluded that the publisher had rejected what would become one of the most famous novels of the 20th century. “That is bullshit. He did not have it in his hands, ”the writer told him immediately.
There are many times in which it has been denied that said rejection occurred. "But it doesn't matter, it repeats itself from time to time," Otero acknowledges from the other end of the phone as he heads to Calafell, one of the enclaves where the 'Carlos Barral y...' congress has taken place these days, a convention that was born with the intention of becoming an annual event that unites the figure of the poet and editor with that of the writers of the Latin American literature boom. The author chosen for this first edition was Gabriel García Márquez and "it is inevitable that the anecdote reappears again."
Otero's grandmother "may have had something to blame." She suggested that the document might arrive while they were on vacation, but it didn't. The only thing that arrived was a telegram from the Colombian writer announcing that he had a new work and that the editor saw when he returned from his trip. “The natural thing was to make the offer to my grandfather. But in the end, I imagine that faced with an economic emergency, Gabo prioritized his interests and accepted the offer made by the Sudamericana publishing house. So there was no room to negotiate anything,” says Otero.
That Seix Barral was not the chosen house was not a problem for the author and publisher to maintain a friendship that was consolidated over the years. “Everything remains as an anecdote that they took advantage of to play distraction. They themselves made the ball bigger by not denying the rejection. They compared themselves to André Gide, who dismissed Proust. But then everything was magnified when the writer Juan Goytisolo, with whom my grandfather did not get along too well, dedicated a few words to him in El País. The rumors went to more ”. Some rumors that Barral himself tried to silence with a letter to the editor that he sent to the aforementioned newspaper in August 1979.
“It is time for me to say that I did not reject the manuscript, a manuscript that I did not have the opportunity to read, of the capital book by Gabriel García Márquez. It is true that García Márquez, whom I had never met and whose previous books I knew, sent me a telegram proposing that I read the manuscript, a telegram that arrived on the brink of a trip or vacation, which I did not reply within the stipulated period. I did not read One Hundred Years of Solitude, whose manuscript had not crossed the ocean until after it had been published by Editorial Sudamericana”.
But not even the explanation given by the protagonists of the events was enough for history to revive today. Otero associates it with a question of "polarization", which could be given "by political issues that would arise as a result of the disagreement between the Colombian writer and Mario Vargas Llosa". Both authors, who became neighbors in Barcelona, maintained for years a solid friendship that ended with a punch in the eye.Neither of the two ever explained what the intention of the blow was, although everything indicates that it was related to Patricia Llosa.
“Almost all the versions hide antipathy for the author and insinuate that the publisher was right not to publish One Hundred Years of Solitude. And that, on many occasions, is said by sympathizers of the Peruvian writer. Not so much mention is made of other notorious rejections by my grandfather that did occur, such as that of Mafalda, since he said that he did not publish stick figures, or that of his great friend Umberto Eco, whom he did not include in his catalog because he did not fit in. The programing. Lumen benefited from it. Be that as it may, and no matter how hard we all explain it, I think the García Márquez anecdote will haunt them forever and ever. Let's take it with humor”, concludes Otero
