Gabriel García Márquez spent 18 months writing One Hundred Years of Solitude , chain-smoking through a Mexico City apartment while his wife sold the car and ran up grocery debt. He had to pawn kitchen appliances to afford the postage when he finally mailed the manuscript. The book sold 50 million copies.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice..."
The first sentence moves through three time periods — a future execution, a "many years later" frame, and a child's memory of ice. García Márquez signals on page one that this novel does not obey linear time. History in Macondo is a spiral; everyone lives in their grandparents' unfinished stories, and no one escapes.