Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude celebrates its 40th birthday this year.

Ours is the age of mediated kitsch. A single episode of a Mexican telenovela today is watched by far more people than all the readers of Garcia Marquez's novel, maybe of his entire oeuvre. But like the firefly, the soap opera perishes almost the second it stirs up its audience's passion. One Hundred Years of Solitude is imperishable.

It seems to me that, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It's a "total" novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours. One Hundred Years of Solitude has done something astonishing: It has survived, accumulating disparate, at times conflicting, rereadings. Isn't that what a classic is, a mirror in which readers see what they are looking for?