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= One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude =
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Introduction
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'One Hundred Years of Solitude' (, ) is a 1967 novel by Colombian
author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story
of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded
the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the
supreme achievements in world literature. It was recognized as one of
the most important works of the Spanish language during the 4th
International Conference of the Spanish Language held in Cartagena de
Indias in March 2007.
The magical realist style and thematic substance of the book
established it as an important representative novel of the literary
Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically
influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban
'Vanguardia' (Avant-Garde) literary movement.
Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial
Sudamericana, the book has been translated into 46 languages and sold
more than 50 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez's
'magnum opus', remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of
the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in
world literature.
In 2024, the book was adapted into an authorized television series
released on Netflix and executive produced by García Márquez's sons.
Background
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In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez was driving to Acapulco for a vacation
with his family when he thought of the beginning for a new book; he
then turned his car around, asked his wife to manage the family's
finances for the coming months, and drove back home to Mexico City.
For the next year and a half, García Márquez spent his time writing
what would eventually become 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. Though
inspired by Colombian history and his experiences as a journalist,
García Márquez was greatly influenced by his maternal grandparents:
Nicolás Ricardo Márquez and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes. A decorated
veteran of the Thousand Days' War, Ricardo Márquez's accounts of the
rebellion against the conservative Colombian government led his
grandson to a socialist outlook. Meanwhile, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes'
superstitious beliefs became the foundation of the book's style. The
couple's house in Aracataca where García Márquez spent his childhood
inspired him to make Macondo his book's setting.
García Márquez was one of the four Latin American novelists first
included in the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s;
the other three were the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine
Julio Cortázar, and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. In 1967, the book
earned García Márquez international fame as a novelist of the magical
realism movement within Latin American literature.
Plot
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The book tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía family in
the town of Macondo. The founders of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía and
Úrsula Iguarán, leave their hometown after José Arcadio kills
Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting José Arcadio was
impotent. One night of their emigration journey, while camping on a
riverbank, José Arcadio dreams of "Macondo", a city of mirrors that
reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to
establish Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the
jungle, his founding of Macondo is utopic.
José Arcadio Buendía believes Macondo to be surrounded by water, and
from that island, he invents the world according to 'his' perceptions.
Soon after its founding, Macondo became a town frequented by unusual
and extraordinary events that involve the generations of the Buendía
family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their periodic (mostly
self-inflicted) misfortunes. For years the town has been solitary and
unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual
visit of a band of Gypsies, who show the townspeople scientific
discoveries such as magnets, telescopes, and ice. The leader of the
Gypsies, a man named Melquíades, maintains a close friendship with
José Arcadio, who becomes increasingly withdrawn, obsessed with
investigating the mysteries of the universe presented to him by the
Gypsies. Ultimately, José Arcadio is driven insane, speaking only in
Latin, and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years
until his death.
Eventually Macondo becomes exposed to the outside world and the
government of newly independent Colombia. A rigged election between
the Conservative and Liberal parties is held in town, inspiring
Aureliano Buendía (José Arcadio’s son) to join a civil war against the
Conservative government. He becomes an iconic revolutionary leader,
fighting for many years and surviving multiple attempts on his life,
but ultimately tires of war and signs a peace treaty with the
Conservatives. Disillusioned, he returns to Macondo and spends the
rest of his life making tiny gold fish in his workshop.
The railroad comes to Macondo, bringing in new technology and many
foreign settlers. An American fruit company establishes a banana
plantation outside the town, and builds its own segregated village
across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in
tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking
plantation workers, an incident based on the Banana Massacre of 1928.
José Arcadio Segundo, the only survivor of the massacre, finds no
evidence of the massacre, and the surviving townspeople deny or refuse
to believe it happened.
By the novel's end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and
near-abandoned state, with the only remaining Buendías being Amaranta
Úrsula and her nephew Aureliano, whose parentage is hidden by his
grandmother Fernanda; he and Amaranta Úrsula unknowingly begin an
incestuous relationship. They have a child who bears the tail of a
pig, fulfilling the lifelong fear of the long-dead matriarch Úrsula.
Amaranta Úrsula dies in childbirth and the child is devoured by ants,
leaving Aureliano as the last member of the family. He decodes an
encryption Melquíades had left behind in a manuscript generations ago.
The manuscript reveals every fortune and misfortune that the Buendía
family's generations lived through. As Aureliano reads the manuscript,
he feels a windstorm starting around him, and he reads in the document
that the Buendía family is doomed to be wiped from the face of the
Earth because of it. In the last sentence of the book, the narrator
describes Aureliano reading this last line just as the entire town of
Macondo is scoured from existence.
Symbolism and metaphors
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A dominant theme in the book is the inevitable and inescapable
repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by
their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the
characters are visited by ghosts. "The ghosts are symbols of the past
and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the
displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in
the particular development of Latin American history", writes Daniel
Erickson. "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the
Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged
from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of
dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions
that haunt and reinforce such social conditions."
The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very
existence. "Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that
ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking
the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns
that deny alternative possibilities. The narrative seemingly confirms
fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that
ideology can performatively create."
García Márquez uses colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most
frequently used and symbolize imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de
Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow
represents death, change, and destruction.
The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a
dream. It is the reason for Macondo's location, but also a symbol of
its fate. Higgins writes, "By the final page, however, the city of
mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the
dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was
cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history." Images
such as the glass city and the ice factory represent how Latin America
already has its history outlined and is therefore fated for
destruction.
There is an underlying pattern of Latin American history in the book.
It has been said that the novel is one of a number of texts that
"Latin American culture has created to understand itself." In this
sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive that narrates
the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which
had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive
is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American
history and also a decoding instrument. Melquíades, the keeper of the
archive, represents both the whimsical and the literary. Finally, "the
world of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a place where beliefs and
metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become
uncertain."
The use of particular historic events and characters renders the book
an exemplary work of magical realism, wherein the novel compresses
decades of cause and effect whilst telling an interesting story.
First generation
==================
;José Arcadio Buendía
José Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and the
founder of Macondo. Buendía leaves his hometown in Riohacha
Municipality, Colombia, along with his wife Úrsula Iguarán, after
being haunted by the corpse of Prudencio Aguilar (a man Buendía killed
in a duel), who constantly bleeds from his wound and tries to wash it.
One night while camping at the side of a river, Buendía dreams of a
city of mirrors named Macondo and decides to establish the town in
this location. José Arcadio Buendía is an introspective and
inquisitive man of massive strength and energy who spends more time on
his scientific pursuits than with his family. He flirts with alchemy
and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and
community. He eventually goes insane and is tied to a chestnut tree
until his death.
;Úrsula Iguarán
Úrsula Iguarán is the matriarch of the Buendía family and is wife and
cousin to José Arcadio Buendía. She lives to be well over 100 years
old and she oversees the Buendía household through six of the seven
generations documented in the novel. She has a business of making
candy animals and pastries which she continues until the arrival of
Fernanda. She exhibits a very strong character and often succeeds
where the men of her family fail, for example finding a route to the
outside world from Macondo. She deeply fears her family resuming their
incestuous practices as her inbred relatives tended to have
animalistic features. From a strong and active matriarch, Úrsula is
reduced to a plaything for Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano in her last
years and shrinks to the size of a newborn baby when she finally dies.
Second generation
===================
;José Arcadio
José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula's firstborn child, José Arcadio seems
to have inherited his father's headstrong, impulsive mannerisms. He
eventually leaves the family after being molested by Pilar Ternera to
chase a Gypsy girl and unexpectedly returns many years later as an
enormous man covered in tattoos, claiming that he has sailed the seas
of the world. He marries his adopted sister Rebeca, causing his
banishment from the mansion, and he dies from a mysterious gunshot
wound, days after saving his brother from execution.
;Colonel Aureliano Buendía
José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula's second child and the first person to
be born in Macondo. He was thought to have premonitions because
everything he said came true. He represents not only a warrior figure
but also an artist due to his ability to write poetry and create
finely crafted golden fish. During the wars he fathered 17 sons by
unknown women, all named Aureliano. Four of them later begin to live
in Macondo, and in the span of several weeks all of them but one
(including those who chose not to remain in Macondo) are murdered by
unknown assassins, before any of them had reached thirty-five years of
age.
;Amaranta
José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula's third child, Amaranta grows up as a
companion of her adopted sister Rebeca. However, her feelings toward
Rebeca turn sour over Pietro Crespi, whom both sisters intensely
desired in their teenage years. Amaranta does everything she can to
prevent Rebeca and Pietro marrying, even attempting to murder Rebeca.
Amaranta dies a lonely and virginal spinster, but comfortable in her
existence after having finally accepted what she had become.
In her later years, she becomes a caring figure within the Buendía
household, particularly showing affection for her nephew, Aureliano
José.
;Remedios Moscote
Remedios was the youngest daughter of the town's Conservative
administrator, Don Apolinar Moscote. Her most striking physical
features are her beautiful skin and her emerald-green eyes. The future
Colonel Aureliano falls in love with her, despite her extreme youth.
She dies shortly after the marriage from a blood poisoning illness
during her pregnancy. Until soon before the Colonel's death, her dolls
are displayed in his bedroom.
;Rebeca
Rebeca is the second cousin of Úrsula Iguarán and the orphaned child
of Nicanor Ulloa and Rebeca Montiel. At first, she is extremely timid,
refuses to speak, and has the habits of eating earth and whitewash
from the walls of the house, a condition known as pica. She arrives
carrying a canvas bag containing her parents' bones and seems not to
understand or speak Spanish. However, she responds to questions asked
by Visitación and Cataure in the Guajiro or Wayuu language. She falls
in love with and marries her adoptive brother José Arcadio after his
return from traveling the world. After his mysterious and untimely
death, she lives in seclusion for the rest of her life.
;Pilar Ternera
Pilar is a local woman who moved to Macondo to escape the man who
raped her as a teenager. She sleeps with the brothers Aureliano and
José Arcadio. She becomes the mother of their sons, Aureliano José and
Arcadio respectively. Pilar reads the future with cards, and every so
often makes an accurate, though vague, prediction. She has close ties
with the Buendías throughout the whole novel, helping them with her
card predictions. She dies some time after she turns 145 years old
(she had eventually stopped counting), surviving until the last days
of Macondo.
She plays an integral part in the plot as she is the link between the
second and the third generations of the Buendía family. The author
highlights her importance by following her death with a declaratory
"it was the end."
Third generation
==================
;Arcadio
Arcadio is José Arcadio's illegitimate son with Pilar Ternera,
although he never learns about his origins. He is a schoolteacher who
assumes leadership of Macondo after Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves.
He becomes a tyrannical dictator and uses his schoolchildren as his
personal army and Macondo soon becomes subject to his whims. When the
Liberal forces in Macondo fall, Arcadio is shot by a Conservative
firing squad.
;Aureliano José
Aureliano José is Colonel Aureliano Buendía's illegitimate son with
Pilar Ternera. He joins his father in several wars before deserting to
return to Macondo upon hearing that it is possible to marry one's
aunt. Aureliano José is obsessed with his aunt, Amaranta, who raised
him since birth and molested him as a child, and who rejects the
marriage proposal he makes as an adult. He is eventually shot to death
by a Conservative captain midway through the wars.
;Santa Sofía de la Piedad
Santa Sofía is a beautiful virgin girl and the daughter of a
shopkeeper. She is hired by Pilar Ternera to have sex with her son
Arcadio, her eventual husband. She is taken in along with her children
by the Buendías after Arcadio's execution. After Úrsula's death she
leaves unexpectedly, not knowing her destination.
;17 Aurelianos
During his 32 civil war campaigns, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has 17
sons by 17 different women, each named after their father. Four of
these Aurelianos (A. Triste, A. Serrador, A. Arcaya and A. Centeno)
stay in Macondo and become a permanent part of the family. Eventually,
as revenge against the Colonel, all are assassinated by unknown
assailants, who identified them by the mysteriously permanent Ash
Wednesday cross on their foreheads. The only survivor of the massacre
is A. Amador, who escapes into the jungle only to be assassinated at
the doorstep of his father's house many years later.
Fourth generation
===================
Remedios the Beauty Remedios the Beauty is Arcadio and Santa Sofía's
first child. It is said she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in
Macondo, and unintentionally causes the deaths of several men who love
or lust over her. She appears to most of the town as naively innocent,
and some come to think that she is mentally delayed. However, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía believes she has inherited great lucidity: "It is as
if she's come back from twenty years of war," he said. She rejects
clothing and beauty which has the opposite effect and makes her more
beautiful. Too beautiful and, arguably, too wise for the world,
Remedios ascends to heaven one afternoon, while folding Fernanda's
white sheet.
;José Arcadio Segundo
José Arcadio Segundo is Aureliano Segundo's twin brother, and one of
Arcadio and Santa Sofía's three children. Úrsula believes that the two
were switched in their childhood, as José Arcadio begins to show the
characteristics of the family's Aurelianos, growing up to be pensive
and quiet. He plays a major role in the banana worker strike, and is
the only survivor when the company massacres the striking workers.
Afterward, he spends the rest of his days studying the parchments of
Melquíades, and tutoring the young Aureliano. He dies at the exact
instant that his twin does.
;Aureliano Segundo
Aureliano Segundo is José Arcadio Segundo's twin brother, and one of
Arcadio and Santa Sofía's three children. Of the two brothers,
Aureliano Segundo is the more boisterous and impulsive, much like the
José Arcadios of the family. He takes his first girlfriend Petra Cotes
as his mistress during his marriage to the beautiful and bitter
Fernanda del Carpio. When living with Petra, his livestock propagate
wildly, and he indulges in unrestrained revelry. After the long rains,
his fortune dries up, and the Buendías are left almost penniless. He
turns to a search for a buried treasure, which nearly drives him to
insanity. He dies of an unknown throat illness at the same moment as
his twin. During the confusion at the funeral, the bodies are
switched, and each is buried in the other's grave (highlighting
Úrsula's earlier comment that they had been switched at birth).
Fernanda del Carpio Fernanda comes from a ruined, aristocratic family
that kept her isolated from the world. She was chosen as the most
beautiful of 5,000 girls. She is brought to Macondo to compete with
Remedios the Beauty for the title of Queen of the local carnival;
however, her appearance turns the carnival into a bloody
confrontation. After the fiasco, she marries Aureliano Segundo, who
despite this maintains a domestic relation with his concubine, Petra
Cotes. Nevertheless, she soon takes the leadership of the family away
from the now frail Úrsula. She manages the Buendía affairs with an
iron fist. She has three children by Aureliano Segundo: José Arcadio;
Renata Remedios, a.k.a. Meme; and Amaranta Úrsula. She remains in the
house after her husband dies, taking care of the household until her
death.
Fernanda is never accepted by anyone in the Buendía household for they
regard her as an outsider, although none of the Buendías rebel against
her inflexible conservatism. Her mental and emotional instability is
revealed through her paranoia, her correspondence with the "invisible
doctors", and her irrational behavior towards Meme's son Aureliano,
whom she tries to isolate from the world.
;Petra Cotes
Petra is a dark-skinned mulatto woman with gold-brown eyes similar to
those of a panther. She is Aureliano Segundo's mistress and the love
of his life. She arrives in Macondo as a teenager with her first
husband. After her husband dies, she begins a relationship with José
Arcadio Segundo. When she meets Aureliano Segundo, she begins a
relationship with him as well, not knowing they are two different men.
After José Arcadio decides to leave her, Aureliano Segundo gets her
forgiveness and remains by her side. He continues to see her, even
after his marriage. He eventually lives with her, which greatly
embitters his wife, Fernanda del Carpio. When Aureliano and Petra make
love, their animals reproduce at an amazing rate, but their livestock
is wiped out during the four years of rain. Petra makes money by
keeping the lottery alive and provides food baskets for Fernanda and
her family after the death of Aureliano Segundo.
Fifth generation
==================
;José Arcadio
José Arcadio, named after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, is
Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda's oldest child and follows the trend of
previous Arcadios. He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to
become Pope. After Fernanda's death, he returns from Rome without
having become a priest. He spends his days pining for Amaranta, the
object of his obsession. Eventually, he discovers the treasure Úrsula
had buried under her bed, which he wastes on lavish parties and
escapades with adolescent boys. Later, he begins a tentative
friendship with Aureliano Babilonia, his nephew. José Arcadio plans to
set Aureliano up in a business and return to Rome, but is murdered in
his bath by four of the adolescent boys who ransack his house and
steal his gold.
;Renata Remedios (a.k.a. Meme)
Renata Remedios, or Meme, is Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda's second
child and first daughter. While she doesn't inherit Fernanda's beauty,
she does have Aureliano Segundo's love of life and natural charisma.
After her mother declares that she is to do nothing but play the
clavichord, she is sent to school where she receives her performance
degree as well as academic recognition. While she pursues the
clavichord with "an inflexible discipline" to placate Fernanda, she
also enjoys partying and exhibits the same tendency towards excess as
her father.
Meme meets and falls in love with Mauricio Babilonia, but when
Fernanda discovers their affair, she arranges for Mauricio to be shot,
claiming that he was a chicken thief. She then takes Meme to a
convent. Meme remains mute for the rest of her life, partially because
of the trauma, but also as a sign of rebellion. Several months after
arriving at the convent, she gives birth to a son, Aureliano. He is
sent to live with the Buendías. Aureliano arrives in a basket and
Fernanda is tempted to kill the child in order to avoid shame, but
instead claims he is an orphan in order to cover up her daughter's
promiscuity and is forced to "tolerate him against her will for the
rest of her life because at the moment of truth she lacked the courage
to go through with her inner determination to drown him".
;Amaranta Úrsula
Amaranta Úrsula is Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda's third child. She
displays the same characteristics as her namesake who dies when she is
only a child. She never knows that the child sent to the Buendía home
is her nephew, the illegitimate son of Meme. He becomes her best
friend in childhood. She returns home from Europe with an older
husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs him of her passionate
affair with Aureliano. She dies of a hemorrhage after she has given
birth to the last of the Buendía line.
;Mauricio Babilonia
Mauricio is a brutally honest, generous and handsome mechanic for the
banana company. He is said to be a descendant of the Gypsies who visit
Macondo in the early days. He has the unusual characteristic of being
constantly swarmed by yellow butterflies, which follow even his lover
for a time. Mauricio begins a romantic affair with Meme until Fernanda
discovers them and tries to end it. When Mauricio continues to sneak
into the house to see her, Fernanda has him shot, claiming he is a
chicken thief. Paralyzed and bedridden, he spends the rest of his long
life in solitude.
;Gastón
Gastón is Amaranta Úrsula's wealthy, Belgian husband. She marries him
in Europe and returns to Macondo leading him on a silk leash. Gastón
is about fifteen years older than his wife. He is an aviator and an
adventurer. When he moves with Amaranta Ursula to Macondo he thinks it
is only a matter of time before she realizes that her European ways
are out of place, causing her to want to move back to Europe. However,
when he realizes his wife intends to stay in Macondo, he arranges for
his airplane to be shipped over so he can start an airmail service.
The plane is shipped to Africa by mistake. When he travels there to
claim it, Amaranta writes to him of her love for Aureliano Babilonia
Buendía. Gastón takes the news in stride, only asking that they ship
him his velocipede.
Sixth generation
==================
;Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II)
Aureliano Babilonia, or Aureliano II, is Meme's illegitimate child
with Mauricio Babilonia. He is hidden from everyone by his
grandmother, Fernanda. He is strikingly similar to his namesake, the
Colonel, and has the same character patterns as well. He is taciturn,
silent, and emotionally charged. He barely knows Úrsula, who dies
during his childhood. He is a friend of José Arcadio Segundo, who
explains to him the true story of the banana worker massacre.
While other members of the family leave and return, Aureliano stays in
the Buendía home. He only ventures into the empty town after the death
of Fernanda. He works to decipher the parchments of Melquíades but
stops to have an affair with his childhood partner and the love of his
life, Amaranta Úrsula, not knowing that she is his aunt. When both she
and her child die, he is able to decipher the parchments.
"...Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the
epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time
and space: 'The first in line is tied to a tree and the last is being
eaten by ants'." It is assumed he dies in the great wind that destroys
Macondo the moment he finishes reading Melquíades' parchments.
With his death, the Buendía line ends.
Seventh generation
====================
;Aureliano
Aureliano is the child of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula. He
is born with a pig's tail, as the eldest and long dead Úrsula had
always feared would happen (the parents of the child had never heard
of the omen). His mother dies after giving birth to him, and, due to
his grief-stricken father's negligence, he is devoured by ants.
Others
========
;Melquíades
Melquíades is one of a band of Gypsies who visit Macondo every year in
March, displaying amazing items from around the world. Melquíades
sells José Arcadio Buendía several new inventions including a pair of
magnets and an alchemist's lab. Later, the Gypsies report that
Melquíades died in Singapore, but he, nonetheless, returns to live
with the Buendía family, stating he could not bear the solitude of
death. He stays with the Buendías and begins to write the mysterious
parchments, which are eventually translated by Aureliano Babilonia,
and prophesy the House of Buendía's end. Melquíades dies a second time
from drowning in the river near Macondo and, following a grand
ceremony organized by the Buendías, is the first individual buried in
Macondo. His name echoes Melchizedek in the Old Testament, whose
source of authority as a high priest was mysterious.
;Pietro Crespi
Pietro is a very handsome and polite Italian musician who runs a music
school. He installs the pianola in the Buendía house. He becomes
engaged to Rebeca, but Amaranta, who also loves him, manages to delay
the wedding for years. When José Arcadio and Rebeca agree to be
married, Pietro begins to woo Amaranta, who is so embittered that she
cruelly rejects him. Despondent over the loss of both sisters, he
kills himself.
;Mr. Herbert and Mr. Brown
Mr. Herbert is a gringo who shows up at the Buendía house for lunch
one day. After tasting the local bananas for the first time, he
arranges for a banana company to set up a plantation in Macondo. The
plantation is run by the dictatorial Jack Brown. When José Arcadio
Segundo helps arrange a workers' strike on the plantation, the company
traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them down
in the town square. The banana company and the government completely
cover up the event. José Arcadio is the only one who remembers the
slaughter. The company arranges for the army to kill off any
resistance, then leaves Macondo for good. The event is likely based on
the Banana massacre that took place in Ciénaga, Magdalena in 1928.
;Colonel Gerineldo Márquez
He is the friend and comrade-in-arms of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. He
fruitlessly woos Amaranta.
;Gabriel (Márquez)
Gabriel is only a minor character in the novel but he has the
distinction of bearing almost the same name as the author. He is the
great-great-grandson of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. He and Aureliano
Babilonia are close friends because they know the history of the town,
which no one else believes. He leaves for Paris after winning a
contest and decides to stay there, selling old newspapers and empty
bottles. He is one of the few who is able to leave Macondo before the
town is wiped out entirely.
Subjectivity of reality and magic realism
===========================================
Critics often cite certain works by García Márquez, such as 'A Very
Old Man with Enormous Wings' and 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', as
exemplary of magic realism, a style of writing in which the
supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural
or extraordinary. The term was coined by German art critic Franz Roh
in 1925.
The novel presents a fictional story in a fictional setting. The
extraordinary events and characters are fabricated, yet García Márquez
uses his fantastic story as an expression of reality. "In 'One Hundred
Years of Solitude' myth and history overlap. The myth acts as a
vehicle to transmit history to the reader. García Márquez's novel
could also be referred to as anthropology, where truth is found in
language and myth. The real and the fiction are indistinguishable.
There are three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories
alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling mythical
heroes, and supernatural elements."
Magic realism is achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary
with the extraordinary. This magic realism strikes at one's
traditional sense of naturalistic fiction. There is something clearly
magical about the world of Macondo. It is a state of mind as much as,
or more than, a geographical place. For example, one learns very
little about its actual physical layout. Furthermore, once in it, the
reader must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author
presents to them.
García Márquez blends the real with the magical through the use of
tone and narration. By maintaining the same tone throughout the novel,
García Márquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary. His
condensation of events and lackadaisical manner in describing them
causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is,
further blending the real with the magical. Reinforcing this effect is
the unastonished tone in which the book is written. This tone
restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the
novel. However, it also causes the reader to call into question the
limits of reality. Furthermore, maintaining the same narrator
throughout the novel familiarizes the reader with his voice and causes
them to become accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel.
Throughout the novel, García Márquez is said to have a gift for
blending the everyday with the miraculous, the historical with the
fabulous, and psychological realism with surreal flights of fancy. It
is a revolutionary novel that provides a looking glass into the
thoughts and beliefs of its author, who chose to give a literary voice
to Latin America: "A Latin America which neither wants, nor has any
reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely
wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality
should become a Western aspiration."
Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, García Márquez
is able to define clear themes while maintaining individual character
identities, and using different narrative techniques such as
third-person narrators, specific point of view narrators, and streams
of consciousness. Cinematographic techniques are also employed in the
novel, with the idea of the montage and the close-up, which
effectively combine the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and
tragic. Furthermore, political and historical realities are combined
with the mythical and magical Latin American world. Lastly, through
human comedy the problems of a family, a town, and a country are
unveiled. This is all presented through García Márquez's unique form
of narration, which causes the novel to never cease being at its most
interesting point.
Solitude
==========
Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude.
Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest.
The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in
Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all
intents and purposes, not interconnected. Isolated from the rest of
the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish.
With every member of the family living only for him or her self, the
Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite
who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin
American history symbolized in the novel. This egocentricity is
embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a
private world of his own, and Remedios the Beauty, who innocently
destroys the lives of four men enamored by her unbelievable beauty,
because she is living in a different reality due to what some see as
autism. Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true
love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.
The selfishness of the Buendía family is eventually broken by the once
superficial Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, who discover a sense of
mutual solidarity and the joy of helping others in need during
Macondo's economic crisis. The pair even find love, and their pattern
is repeated by Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula. Eventually,
Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula have a child, and the latter is
convinced that it will represent a fresh start for the once-conceited
Buendía family. However, the child turns out to be the perpetually
feared monster with the pig's tail.
Nonetheless, the appearance of love represents a shift in Macondo,
albeit one that leads to its destruction. "The emergence of love in
the novel to displace the traditional egoism of the Buendías reflects
the emergence of socialist values as a political force in Latin
America, a force that will sweep away the Buendías and the order they
represent." The book's ending could be a wishful prediction by García
Márquez, a well-known socialist, regarding the future of Latin
America.
Fluidity of time
==================
The book contains several ideas concerning time. Although the story
can be read as a linear progression of events, both when considering
individual lives and Macondo's history, García Márquez allows room for
several other interpretations of time:
* He reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon
through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the
Buendía family. Over six generations, all the José Arcadios possess
inquisitive and rational dispositions as well as enormous physical
strength. The Aurelianos, meanwhile, lean towards insularity and
quietude. This repetition of traits reproduces the history of the
individual characters and, ultimately, the history of the town as a
succession of the same mistakes ad infinitum due to some endogenous
hubris in our nature.
* The novel explores the issue of timelessness or eternity even within
the framework of mortal existence. A major trope with which it
accomplishes this task is the alchemist's laboratory in the Buendía
family home. The laboratory was first designed by Melquíades near the
start of the story and remains essentially unchanged throughout its
course. It is a place where the male Buendía characters can indulge
their will to solitude, whether through attempts to deconstruct the
world with reason as in the case of José Arcadio Buendía, or by the
endless creation and destruction of golden fish as in the case of his
son Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Furthermore, a sense of inevitability
prevails throughout the text. This is a feeling that regardless of
what way one looks at time, its encompassing nature is the one
truthful admission.
* On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that the book,
while basically chronological and "linear" enough in its broad
outlines, also shows abundant zigzags in time, both flashbacks of
matters past and long leaps towards future events. One example of this
is the youthful amour between Meme and Mauricio Babilonia, which is
already in full swing before we are informed about the origins of the
affair. Another example is the often-praised first line of the novel,
which already established shifting perspective between the past,
present, and future:
Incest
========
A recurring theme in the book is the Buendía family's propensity
towards incest. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendía, is
the first of numerous Buendías to intermarry when he marries his first
cousin, Úrsula. Furthermore, the fact that "throughout the novel the
family is haunted by the fear of punishment in the form of the birth
of a monstrous child with a pig's tail" can be attributed to this
initial act and the recurring acts of incest among the Buendías.
Elitism
=========
A theme throughout the book is the elitism of the Buendía family.
Gabriel García Márquez shows his criticism of the Latin American elite
through the stories of the members of a high-status family who are
essentially in love with themselves, to the point of being unable to
understand the mistakes of their past and learn from them. The Buendía
family's literal loving of themselves through incest not only shows
how elites consider themselves to be above the law, but also reveals
how little they learn from their history. José Arcadio Buendía and
Ursula fear that since their relationship is incestuous, their child
will have animalistic features; even though theirs does not, the final
child of the Buendía line, Aureliano of Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula,
has the tail of a pig, and because they do not know their history,
they do not know that this fear has materialized before, nor do they
know that, had the child lived, removing the tail would have resulted
in his death. This speaks to how elites in Latin America do not pass
down history that remembers them in a negative manner. The Buendía
family further cannot move beyond giving tribute to themselves in the
form of naming their children the same names over and over again.
"José Arcadio" appears four times in the family tree, "Aureliano"
appears 22 times, "Remedios" appears three times and "Amaranta" and
"Ursula" appear twice. The continual references to the sprawling
Buendía house call to mind the idea of a Big House, or 'hacienda,' a
large land holding in which elite families lived and managed their
lands and laborers. In Colombia, where the novel takes place, a Big
House was known for being a grand one-story dwelling with many
bedrooms, parlors, a kitchen, a pantry and a veranda, all areas of the
Buendía household mentioned throughout the book. The book focuses
squarely on one family in the midst of the many residents of Macondo
as a representation of how the poorest of Latin American villages have
been subjugated and forgotten throughout the course of Latin American
history.
Literary significance and acclaim
===================================
The book has received universal recognition. The novel has been
awarded Italy's Chianciano Award, France's Prix de Meilleur Livre
Etranger, Venezuela's Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and the United States'
Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature. García
Márquez also received an honorary LL.D. from Columbia University in
New York City. These awards set the stage for García Márquez's 1982
Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel topped the list of books that
have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, according to
a survey of international writers commissioned by the global literary
journal 'Wasafiri' as a part of its 25th-anniversary celebration.
The superlatives from reviewers and readers alike display the
resounding praise which the novel has received. Chilean poet and Nobel
Laureate Pablo Neruda called it "the greatest revelation in the
Spanish language since 'Don Quixote' of Cervantes", while John Leonard
in 'The New York Times' wrote that "with a single bound, Gabriel
García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir
Nabokov."
According to Antonio Sacoto, professor at the City College of the City
University of New York, the book is considered one of the five key
novels in Hispanic American literature (together with 'El Señor
Presidente', 'Pedro Páramo', 'La Muerte de Artemio Cruz', and 'La
ciudad y los perros'). These novels are often considered
representative of the boom that allowed Hispanic American literature
to reach the quality of North American and European literature in
terms of technical quality, rich themes, and linguistic innovations,
among other attributes.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, García Márquez addressed the
significance of his writing and proposed its role to be more than just
literary expression:
Harold Bloom remarked, "My primary impression, in the act of rereading
'One Hundred Years of Solitude', is a kind of aesthetic battle
fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity
of any single reader to absorb... There are no wasted sentences, no
mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the
moment you read it." David Haberly has argued that García Márquez may
have borrowed themes from several works, such as William Faulkner's
Yoknapatawpha County, Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando: A Biography', Defoe's
'A Journal of the Plague Year', and Chateaubriand's 'Atala', in an
example of intertextuality.
In 2017, Chilean artist Luisa Rivera illustrated a fiftieth
anniversary special edition of the book published by Penguin Random
House Group Editorial, Spain.
Relation to Colombian history
===============================
As a metaphoric, critical interpretation of Colombian history, from
foundation to contemporary nation, the book presents different
national myths through the story of the Buendía family, whose spirit
of adventure places them amidst the important actions of Colombian
historical events. These events include the inclusion of the Roma
"Gypsies", the Liberal political reformation of a colonial way of
life, and the 19th-century arguments for and against it; the arrival
of the railway to a mountainous country; the Thousand Days' War
(Guerra de los Mil Días, 1899-1902); the corporate hegemony of the
United Fruit Company ("American Fruit Company" in the story); the
cinema; the automobile; and the military massacre of striking workers
as government-labour relations policy.
Inclusion of the Roma ("Gypsies")
===================================
According to Hazel Marsh, a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies
at the University of East Anglia, it is estimated that 8,000 Roma live
in Colombia today. However, "most South American history
books...exclude the presence of the Roma." 'One Hundred Years of
Solitude' differs from this tendency by including the traveling Roma
throughout the story. Led by a man named Melquíades, the Roma bring
new discoveries and technology to the isolated village of Macondo,
often inciting the curiosity of José Arcadio Buendía.
Depiction of the Thousand Days War
====================================
The Thousand Days' War in Colombia was fought between Liberals and
Conservatives from 1899 to 1902. The Conservatives had been "in
control more or less constantly since 1867", and the Liberals, mainly
coffee plantation owners and workers who had been excluded from
representation, sparked a revolution in October 1899. The fighting
continued for a few years, and it is estimated that over 130,000
people died.
In Chapters 5 and 6, the Conservative Army has invaded the town of
Macondo, leading Aureliano to eventually lead a rebellion. The
rebellion is successful - the Conservative Army falls - and,
afterwards, Aureliano, now "Colonel Aureliano Buendía", decides to
continue fighting. He departs Macondo with the band of people who
helped him oust the Conservative Army to go continue fighting
elsewhere for the Liberal side.
Because Macondo is a fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez,
the exact events of the Thousand Days' War as they occurred in the
book are fictional. However, these events are widely considered to be
metaphorical for the Thousand Days' War as experienced by the entire
country of Colombia.
Representation of the "Banana Massacre"
=========================================
The "Banana Massacre" occurred December 5-6, 1928, in Ciénega near
Santa Marta, Colombia. Banana plantation workers had been striking
against the United Fruit Company to earn better labor conditions when
members of the local military fired guns into crowds.
This event, which occurs in Chapter 15, was depicted with relative
accuracy, minus a false sense of certainty about the specific facts
surrounding the events. For instance, although García Márquez writes
that there must have been "three thousand...dead", the true number of
victims is unknown. However, the number likely was not far off,
because it is considered that the "number of killings was over a
thousand", according to Dr. Jorge Enrique Elias Caro and Dr. Antonino
Vidal Ortega. The lack of information surrounding the "Banana
Massacre" is thought to be largely due to the "manipulation of the
information as registered by the Colombian Government and the United
Fruit Company".
This uncertainty is also reflected in the novel’s portrayal of the
aftermath, where official denial is emphasized through a fictional
legal response where “ six lawyers argue that ‘the banana company did
not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its
service,’ and the court establishes ‘in solemn decrees that the
workers did not exist’”. This moment illustrates how the novel mirrors
the historical ambiguity and conflicting narratives that surrounded
the real event.
Internal references
======================================================================
In the novel's account of the civil war and subsequent peace, there
are numerous mentions of the pensions not arriving for the veterans, a
reference to one of García Márquez's earlier works, 'El coronel no
tiene quien le escriba'. In the novel's final chapter, García Márquez
refers to the novel 'Hopscotch' (Spanish: 'Rayuela') by Julio Cortázar
in the following line: "...in the room that smelled of boiled
cauliflower where Rocamadour was to die" (p. 412). Rocamadour is a
fictional character in 'Hopscotch' who indeed dies in the room
described. He also refers to two other major works by Latin American
writers in the novel: 'The Death of Artemio Cruz' (Spanish: 'La Muerte
de Artemio Cruz') by Carlos Fuentes and 'Explosion in a Cathedral'
(Spanish: 'El siglo de las luces') by Alejo Carpentier.
Adaptations
======================================================================
Shūji Terayama's play 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' ( ; originally
performed by the Tenjō Sajiki theater troupe) and his film 'Farewell
to the Ark' ( ) are loose (and unauthorized) adaptations of the novel
transplanted into the realm of Japanese culture and history.
Television series
On March 6, 2019, García Márquez's son Rodrigo García Barcha announced
that Netflix was adapting the book into a TV series.
On October 21, 2022, Netflix commemorated the fortieth anniversary of
the announcement of García Márquez's Nobel Prize in Literature with an
exclusive preview of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'.
On the tenth anniversary of García Márquez's death, Netflix released
the official teaser for 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' and revealed
that the series will run for sixteen episodes. The cast includes
Claudio Cataño (Colonel Aureliano Buendía), Jerónimo Barón (young
Aureliano Buendía), Marco González (Jose Arcadio Buendía), Leonardo
Soto (José Arcadio), Susana Morales (Úrsula Iguarán), Ella Becerra
(Petronila Iguarán), Carlos Suaréz (Aureliano Iguarán), Moreno Borja
(Melquiades), and Santiago Vásquez (teenage Aureliano Buendía).
The book is considered by fans to be García Márquez's masterpiece yet
he himself refused to sell the screening rights to his novel because
he did not want it to be adapted in any language other than Spanish
and felt a film adaptation would not cover the entire plot due to its
length. For its TV adaptation, Netflix worked with Rodrigo and Gonzalo
García who served as the show's executive producers. The episodes were
all shot in the late writer's native Colombia and directed by Alex
García Lopez, and all the characters' lines are spoken in Spanish.
Barbara Enriquez, who had previously worked on Netflix's 'Roma',
served as the show's production designer. The TV series is Netflix's
most expensive Latin American-made project to date, with Colombian
groups and indigenous communities making and providing props, and a
total of four hundred fifty locals building three different versions
of Macondo for the progression of the series.
In García Márquez's birthplace of Aracataca, the locals were
disappointed that the TV series was not shot there, yet they still
hope that it will draw people in.
The series premiered on December 11, 2024.
See also
======================================================================
* 'Le Monde' 100 Books of the Century
* List of best-selling books
* 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' (TV series)
* 'What Remains of Edith Finch'
Reading curriculum
====================
*
[
http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Synopsis-of-One-Hundred-Years-of-Solitude
Oprah's Book Club's Guide to 'One Hundred Years of Solitude']
*
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20170131162524/https://edsitement.neh.gov/curriculum-unit/magical-realism-one-hundred-years-solitude-common-core
Magical Realism in "One Hundred Years of Solitude"]
Lectures and recordings
=========================
*
[
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture.html
"The Solitude of Latin America"], Nobel lecture by Gabriel García
Márquez, 8 December 1982
*
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20160416051959/http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/marquez.htm
"On Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude"] - a lecture by Ian
Johnston
*
License
=========
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude
