In the original, obviously.

A confession to start: I've never read this in English and I don't intend to. It's the only novel I feel proprietorial about, which is embarrassing, and I know it.

The thing people repeat is that García Márquez said Rabassa's English was better than his Spanish. This gets quoted as though it were a technical judgement. Was it, though? It's a compliment paid at a party, and it has been carried about ever since like a certificate. I've had the Sudamericana my grandmother owned since 2011, when she died, and the opening sentence in Spanish does something with tenses that I don't believe survives into any language which handles the past differently. Ice, a firing squad, a distant afternoon, all in one breath, three different times at once. That's the machine of the whole book announcing itself in one line.

What I'd forgotten, coming back to it in October, is how funny it is. Everybody discusses the melancholy and the rain and the ants. Nobody mentions the insomnia plague, or the labels on the furniture, or Fernanda's endless letters to the invisible doctors. I laughed properly twice during a sobremesa at my mother's and had to explain myself.

Nine and not ten. What I take off is for the last generation. By the time the final Aureliano is in that room with the parchments I'm reading dutifully rather than helplessly. Also I gave up on the family tree at the front. Everyone does. José Arcadio, Aureliano, Aureliano José, Arcadio. You surrender to the confusion or you stop, and the confusion is deliberate anyway.