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Gabriel García Márquez, then a little-known Colombian journalist, wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude over a period of 18 months, in seclusion, in Mexico City. The book was published in Buenos Aires in 1967, heralding a new literary wave from Latin America and becoming the most important novel ever published in Spanish on this side of the Atlantic.

The protagonists are the fanciful Buendía family of Macondo, a forgotten town on Colombia's Caribbean coast, in a span of time of more than a century (in spite of the title), from the mythical foundation of the town to its demise. The cyclical structure of the plot, its omniscient, third-person narration, and the magical nature of the incidents chronicled fill the book with biblical resonances.

At its core is the most basic of divine curses: incest. The Buendías are born from incest and forever condemned by it. There are indirect references to language that recall the Tower of Babel, sibling rivalries like those of Cain and Abel and Joseph and his brothers, larger-than-life imperial figures like Colonel Aureliano Buendía who recall the kings of biblical Israel, as well as magical (i.e., metaphorical) illnesses such as an epidemic of insomnia and disasters such as a rainstorm of butterflies.

Indeed, in my estimation, there are exactly two novelistic masterpieces written in Spanish whose influence radically revamped our understanding of Hispanic culture: Cervantes's Don Quixote, with its mordant critique of a 17th-century Iberian empire defined by misadventures abroad and a zealous Catholic Inquisition at home and across the Atlantic; and this magisterial narrative by Gabo, as García Márquez is called among friends, a sweeping genealogical narrative about an entire continent and its people: its corrupt politicians, its religious aspirations, its gender disparity, its natural and historical calamities.

Like Cervantes's work, which is purportedly written by a Moor, Gabo's novel is presented as a palimpsest: a manuscript being drafted by a gypsy. What is one to make of the fact that such abused social types in the Spanish-speaking world are the creators of the two literary pillars on which it stands?

Symmetrically divided into 20 unnumbered chapters of approximately 8,000 words each, One Hundred Years of Solitude includes a cast of three dozen characters delineated with equal confidence. Pick your favourite: There's Remedios the Beauty, whose elegiac loveliness made her ascend to heaven; Ursula Iguarán, the Buendía matron, on whose shoulders the endurance of the family lies; the 17 Aurelianos fathered by José Arcadio Buendía; the foreboding prostitute Pilar Ternera; rebellious niñas like Santa Sofia de la Piedad; Indian servants, and Middle Eastern immigrants.

The legend of how Gabo's book came to be is in itself enchanting. He and his wife Mercedes were on their way to Acapulco in a Volkswagen when suddenly he was visited — like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after an opium dream, shaping Kubla Khan — by the muse of fiction. He turned around and isolated himself in his Mexico City study until he finished the manuscript. In his description of the experience, he comes across less as an artist than as a scribe, as if One Hundred Years of Solitude were dictated to him from first to last. (The English translation by Gregory Rabassa is superb, maybe even better than the original.)

Personally, I can't think of a more luminous, if demanding, read. It manages to build a self-sufficient Leibnitzian universe, one paralleling ours. The novel is about memory and forgetfulness, about the trials and tribulations of capitalism in a colonial society, about European explorers in the New World, about the clash of science and belief, about matriarchy as an institution, about loyalty, treason and vengeance in the political arena, about the path that a rivulet of blood takes after a tragic death, about the flora and fauna of the Caribbean, about the mishaps in urban planning, about the fancifulness of names in Spanish-speaking culture (Quick: how many Aurelianos are there?), about the difference between official and popular history, about intelligence and stupidity not as counterparts but as extensions of each other.

In short, One Hundred Years of Solitude is just about everything. Without it we would be infinitely poorer.

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, is author of "On Borrowed Words" and editor of "The Poetry of Pablo Neruda." His "Resurrecting Hebrew" is due out in September.

Next week: King Lear