One Hundred Years of Solitude
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One Hundred Years of Solitude, novel by Gabriel García Márquez, published in Spanish as Cien años de soledad in 1967. It was considered the author’s masterpiece and the foremost example of his style of magic realism.
SUMMARY: This is the author’s epic tale of seven generations of the Buendía family that also spans a hundred years of turbulent Latin American history, from the postcolonial 1820s to the 1920s. Patriarch José Arcadio Buendía builds the utopian city of Macondo in the middle of a swamp. At first prosperous, the town attracts Gypsies and hucksters—among them the old writer Melquíades, a stand-in for the author. A tropical storm lasting nearly five years almost destroys the town, and by the fifth Buendía generation its physical decrepitude is matched by the family’s depravity. A hurricane finally erases all traces of the city.
By the end of the novel Melquíades has been revealed as the narrator; his mysterious manuscripts are in fact the text of the novel. Critics have noted the influence of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in the book’s labyrinthine fantasy.
DETAIL: Widely acknowledged as Gabriel García Márquez’s finest work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the fictional Colombian town Macondo and the rise and fall of its founders, the Buendía family. Revealed through intriguing temporal folds, characters inherit the names and dispositions of their family, unfolding patterns that double and recur. The mighty José Arcadio Buendía goes from intrepid, charismatic founder of Macondo to a madman on its fringes. Macondo fights off plagues of insomnia, war, and rain. Mysteries are spun out of almost nothing.
This beguilingly colorful saga also works out a wider social and political allegory—sometimes too surreal to be plausible, at times more real than any conventional realism could afford. An exemplification of so-called magic realism, this allegorical texture incorporates a sense of the strange, fantastic, or incredible. Perhaps the key sociopolitical example is the apparent massacre by the army of several thousand striking workers whose dead bodies seem to have been loaded into freight trains before being dumped in the sea. Against the smoke screen of the official version, the massacre becomes a nightmare lost in the fog of martial law. The disappeared’s true history takes on a reality stranger than any conventional fiction, demanding fiction for the truth to be told.
While the novel can be read as an alternative, unofficial history, the inventive story telling brings to the foreground sensuality, love, intimacy, and different varieties of privation. Imagine the wit and mystery of the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote told by a narrator capable of metamorphosing from Hardy into Kafka and back in the course of a paragraph. García Márquez may have spawned clumsy imitations whose too clever inventions merely tire, but this is a strange and moving account of solitude.
