Q & A with Álvaro Santana-Acuña on Writing “Ascent to Glory: How ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Was Written and Became a Global Classic”

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

“Every single person alive today was born in a world in which the Odyssey, the Mahābhārata, Don Quixote, and many other classics have been around for centuries. I decided to write Ascent for readers interested in understanding how One Hundred Years of Solitude was made and became a classic that keeps entering the lives of people on all continents.” — Álvaro Santana-Acuña

It was my amigo translator Harry Morales who alerted me to this fascinating, thoroughly researched, elegantly argued, and altogether extra-super-crunchy book by sociologist Álvaro Santana-Acuña: Ascent to Glory, about the rocket-into-the-stratosphere international success of Gabriel García Márquez’s epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. As a novelist myself (The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire), I will admit to, maybe, a smidgette of curiosity about the secret sauce behind the marketing of García Márquez’s book. Suffice to say, I found Ascent to Glory so illuminating that I expect to reread it more than once. Apart from opening a window onto this classic novel and Latin American and international cultural history, Ascent to Glory is also vital reading for anyone interested in the history of publishing per se— there is much to learn about the Latin American publishing industry over the second half of the 20th century, and this history is especially important to appreciate now that we are all in this nuevo mundo or, perhaps I should say, on a nuevo planeta, with digital media and amazon.com.

Álvaro Santana-Acuña earned his PhD from Harvard University and is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Whitman College. He is a contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times en español, and El País. Recently for the Harry Ransom Center he curated “ Gabriel García Márquez: The Making of a Global Writer,” the first major exhibition featuring documents from the García Márquez’s archives, alongside other materials by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. Look for this exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 2021.

Here’s the official catalog copy from Columbia University Press for Ascent to Glory:

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small publisher, magical style, and setting in a remote Caribbean village were hardly the usual ingredients for success in the literary marketplace. Yet today it ranks among the best-selling books of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it continues to enter the lives of new readers around the world. How did One Hundred Years of Solitude achieve this unlikely success? And what does its trajectory tell us about how a work of art becomes a classic? Ascent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, from the moment García Márquez first had the idea for the novel to its global consecration. Using new documents from the author’s archives, Álvaro Santana-Acuña shows how García Márquez wrote the novel, going beyond the many legends that surround it. He unveils the literary ideas and networks that made possible the book’s creation and initial success. Santana-Acuña then follows this novel’s path in more than seventy countries on five continents and explains how thousands of people and organizations have helped it to become a global classic. Shedding new light on the novel’s imagination, production, and reception, Ascent to Glory is an eye-opening book for cultural sociologists and literary historians as well as for fans of García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

C.M. MAYO: In brief, what inspired you to write Ascent to Glory?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: It all happened the fall of 2007, in October or November. I had just started living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By then, I have read a lot about the city’s history, especially its world class universities MIT and Harvard. But I knew nothing about its weather. That fall it was raining almost non-stop for days. One afternoon I was walking with my umbrella under the rain. I was heading towards Lamont library on the Harvard University campus and, while climbing the stairs next to the building, I could hear my footsteps on the water puddles and the rain drumming on the umbrella. It was at this moment, cornered by the water, that I said to myself out loud “gosh, it rains like in Macondo.” Right there, it hit me the connection between the never-ending rain in Cambridge and in Macondo, which in One Hundred Years of Solitude went on for more than four years. The rain in Cambridge did not last long but it gifted me the idea for Ascent to Glory.

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: At first, I wanted to understand why I made such a personal connection between the rain in Cambridge and Macondo. I was puzzled by it because the two cities are so different—to begin with, one is real and the other is fictional. Also, at that time, I had never been to Latin America, where One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place, and I had read the book more than ten years earlier. When I started doing the research for Ascent, about a year after the rain epiphany, I realized that my experience was similar to that of millions of readers whose lives are touched by classics. At some point, classics enter our lives in unexpected ways, stay with us for years, and eventually outlive us. Every single person alive today was born in a world in which the Odyssey, the Mahābhārata, Don Quixote, and many other classics have been around for centuries. I decided to write Ascent for readers interested in understanding how One Hundred Years of Solitude was made and became a classic that keeps entering the lives of people on all continents.

C.M. MAYO: Now that it has been published, can you describe the ideal reader for this book as you see him or her now?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: I worked on Ascent for eleven years. During that time, I ran into all kinds of people, from apple farmers to taxi drivers to Nobel laurates, interested in my book. To my surprise, they were eager to share their memories of when, how, and why they first read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many told me great things about the novel and many also expressed their disapproval. They all had something meaningful to say about the book. Thus, over the years, the ideal reader for Ascent has grown beyond sociology to include fans of literature and classics at large.

C.M. MAYO: In your researches, what are the one or two things that most surprised you to uncover?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: One thing I learned about me is that, in order to write a better book, I refused to take any shortcuts. Let me give you one example. The manuscript was done in early 2017. But in May I received a fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, which holds the personal archives of García Márquez, including documentation about the making of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I ventured into his archives with one goal: to factcheck what I had already written. Days passed and I got more and more immersed into his correspondence, notes, and manuscripts. I realized then that I had to choose between doing some facelifting to the manuscript or rewriting it. I decided to sit down and rewrite. This meant that finishing Ascent took me two more years. I think it is a better book because of this choice. Maybe García Márquez had something to do with it, too. As I was going through the manuscripts of his works, I understood his approach to writing, his craftmanship, his obsession with arriving at the best manuscript he could write. For One Hundred Years of Solitude, it took him seventeen years to reach that point.

To make future research about his novel more difficult, García Márquez destroyed all his notebooks and preliminary drafts. If I wanted to tell readers how he actually wrote it, I had to understand that myself first. For years I found myself looking for clues between the lines of unknown manuscripts, rare interviews, and cryptic letters. It was then when I remembered what Umberto Eco said about the writing of The Name of the Rose. His novel tells the story of characters who try to read what is in Aristotle’s famous volume on comedy. The truth is that nobody knows what is in the lost volume of Aristotle’s Poetics. But in the process of writing his novel, Eco discovered it and shared it with his readers. For me, one of the most surprising things I share with Ascent’s readers is information about the alternative beginnings and ends for the novel, the removal of characters, the transformations experienced by others like Remedios the Beauty, and the edits in places where I know he deleted words, sentences, and full paragraphs. I felt at times that I was watching over his shoulder, seeing him typing the story on his electric typewriter. Witnessing that moment has been an incredible experience. Imagine that you could stand next to Shakespeare as he was writing Hamlet. Readers of Ascent will learn how García Márquez wrote his masterpiece.

C.M. MAYO: Can you share any surprises for you about your book’s reception?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: Ascent has been well received so far, including generous reviews by literary critics, scholars, and common readers in Latin America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey, India, Australia… One of Latin America’s leading literary critics suggested that Ascent may become a “canonical study.” In the United States, a young reviewer, who truly dislikes One Hundred Years of Solitude, wrote a review, highlighting the facts in Ascent that, in her opinion, prove that García Márquez’s novel is pretty bad and overrated. Paradoxically, this is one of the findings in Ascent: bad press helps to build a strong reputation. Classics become classics not only thanks to readers’ praise but also thanks to their entrenched criticism. In the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude, over half a century after its publication, its haters are as bellicose an army as its lovers. So, the global reception of Ascent has brought full circle the point about how One Hundred Years of Solitude has become a global classic.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers have been the most important influences for you as a writer of narrative nonfiction? And for Ascent in particular?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: I have always been attracted to historical narratives and I have learned a great deal from the works of E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and especially Carlo Ginzburg, author of the classic The Cheese and the Worms, a fascinating study of a 16^th-century miller executed by the Italian inquisition. A book that I often reread is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one of the most powerful sociology narratives ever written. Other nonfiction influences include Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Foucault’s The Order of Things, and Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. Above, I mentioned Umberto Eco, whose fiction and nonfiction work speaks to me from an early age. More recently, I follow the work for large audiences written by one of my grad school teachers Nicholas Christakis. Finally, an important influence has been García Márquez himself, who was a masterful nonfiction writer, too.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: I just finished writing Primeras personas by writer, editor, and journalist Juan Cruz, who recalls his encounters and friendships with some of the most important literary figures of the last half century. Believe or not, I just started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, once more; this time because I am working on the Spanish version of Ascent.

C.M. MAYO: How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: While I am writing, I minimize interruptions, including turning off my cellphone and notifications. I only turn it back on when I am having a break. In general, I try to use social media as little as possible. What I do is to log in, scroll down a few posts, and, if I have to post something, I do it and then log off. The truth is that, when we are on social media, we easily loose ownership of our time, which we put for free at the disposal of these companies. We become their workers. I prefer to use my time for other things.

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you or problematic?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: Back in the 1990s, I started writing my manuscripts in longhand and I copied them out on a mechanical typewriter. Shortly after, I transitioned to an electric typewriter and eventually a computer. It took me a few years before I dared to write directly on the computer. Even today I continue to use a paper notebook. I also use my cellphone as a digital notebook for ideas that afterwards I put on paper. I prefer to do the most demanding writing in the morning, usually for up to four hours. After that, my eyesight gets fatigued from the computer screen. Like most people I know, I have become a writing cyborg—an organism that combines mechanical and digital techniques and devices to write.

C.M. MAYO: For writers of narrative nonfiction keeping notes and papers organized can be more than tremendously challenging. Would you have any tips to share?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: Narrative nonfiction must rely on real facts. Paper management is crucial to organize the facts you need to write your story. For this reason, one tip is to annotate your data’s location in full when you are doing the research and when you are writing a draft. If you are working on something for a few days or weeks, you probably can track down that incomplete reference fast. But when you have done research for eleven years for a book like Ascent, which contains facts from over forty foreign languages, ninety countries, fifty years, and five hundred people and organizations on all continents, it is impossible to recall the location of everything you are using to create the narrative.

Another tip is to not confuse rigor with pointless erudition. It is tempting to cross the fine between the two in search of a surprising detail. But every fact has to contribute to move the narrative forward. Otherwise, you lose your reader.

A final tip is to know when to stop. One can accumulate facts and facts, hoping to have a more detailed narrative and never finish it. I recall that the summer of 2018, when I was about to finish a new full version of the manuscript, I was back in Cambridge, doing research at Harvard’s Widener Library. I gathered data that I was hoping to add to the manuscript. To do so, I would have had to rewrite the second part of Ascent, about three chapters. Luckily, my grad school advisor Michèle Lamont was in town that summer and over lunch, as I explained to her my work on the manuscript, she told me that it was ready to go.

C.M. MAYO: For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: Write as well as you can, take no shortcuts, and surround yourself with people who truly understand why and what you write.

C.M. MAYO: What important piece of advice would you give yourself if you could travel back in time eleven years?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: Since I did not know back then I was writing a book, I would say to myself to enjoy the process from the moment the Cambridge rain hit my umbrella.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA: I am now working on the Spanish version of Ascent, entitled Ascenso a la gloria: biografía de Cien años de soledad. It is not really a translation but a new book, including new data. I feel the book’s tone has to be different for Spanish readers. I know this is unusual. In nonfiction books, most authors just oversee the translation and change a few things. Some authors add a new prologue to the translated version and only handful go as far as to write a new chapter. I am trying here something new in writing; Ascent and Ascenso will be twin books.

After Ascenso, I will start writing a new manuscript, for which I have already done the research. It is a history book about one of the things made in France that arguably have most shaped the world. And it is not the croissant, but a particular way of representing space: the land survey maps called cadastre. What inspired me to write that book was not the rain but a conversation with an immigrant taxi driver as he drove down a Parisian boulevard.

> Columbia University Press page for Álvaro Santana-Acuña’s Ascent to Glory
> Read his article for The Atlantic Monthly “How One Hundred Years of Solitude Became a Classic”
> Check out the guide and video for the exhibition he curated at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.
> Álvaro Santana-Acuña’s website at Whitman College
> Álvaro Santana-Acuña’s page on academia.edu