One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude

File:OneHundredYearsOfSolitude.jpg First US edition
Author	Gabriel García Márquez
Original title	Cien años de soledad
Translator	Gregory Rabassa
Language	Spanish
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Harper and Row (USA) & Jonathan Cape (UK)
Publication date	1967 (translation 25 June 1970)
Publication place	Colombia
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	432 pp (UK hardback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-224-61853-9 (UK hardback edition)
OCLC	17522865

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad) is a novel written by Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It was first published in Spanish in 1967. The book was an instant success worldwide and was translated into over 27 languages. Lauded critically, it is the major work of the Latin American "boom" in literature. It was also an immense commercial success, becoming the best-selling book in Spanish in modern history, after Don Quixote. It is widely considered García Márquez's magnum opus.

The novel chronicles the history of the Buendía family in the town founded by their patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía Macondo. It is built on multiple time frames, playing on ideas presented earlier by Jorge Luis Borges in stories such as The Garden of Forking Paths.

Biographical background and publication

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927. He is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982, he has been acclaimed as one of the most influential Latin American writers of all time. His Colombian roots influenced large parts of the novel, as evidenced by the different myths throughout the novel These myths, along with events in the novel, recount a large portion of Colombian history. For instance, “the arguments over reform in the nineteenth century, the arrival of the railway, the War of the Thousand Days, the American fruit company, the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking plantation workers” are all incorporated in the novel at one point or another".

Plot summary

The novel chronicles the seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo. The family patriarch and founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and his wife, Ursula, leave their home in Riohacha, Colombia in hopes of finding a new home. One night on their journey while camping on the banks of a river, Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo. Upon awakening, Buendía decides to found this city on the site of their campground. After its establishment, Macondo soon becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events. All the events revolve around the Buendía family, who are either unable or unwilling to escape periodic, mostly self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, Macondo is destroyed by a terrible hurricane, which symbolizes the cyclical turmoil inherent in Macondo.

Historical Context

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered a work of fiction, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian native, drew upon his country’s history to create a world which parallels many of the major events in Colombia’s history, thus establishing the novel as a piece of critical interpretation.

Prior to European conquest, the region now called Colombia had no cultural developments akin to those of the Incas, the Mayas or the Aztecs The region consisted mainly of large families grouped into larger units that served to define local monarchies . The most well defined tribal groups of the area were the Tairona, the Cenu, the Chibcha . The first Spanish settlement was established in 1509 under the direction of Vasco Nunez de Balboa, as a precursor to the conquest of the territory . Marquez uses the founding of the town of Macondo by the Buendia family as a metaphor for the colonization of the region of Colombia.

After Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada’s conquest of the Chibchas in 1538, Bogotá became the center of Spanish rule After the collapse of Spanish control in 1810, provincial juntas sprang up almost everywhere to challenge Bogotá’s authority. Eventually though, royalist armies led by Pablo Morillo restored Spanish rule in 1816. Three years later when Simon Bolivar began a second war for independence, he declared the creation of a supranational state-Gran Colombia. With its capital at Bogotá, Gran Colombia survived long enough to witness Spain's final defeat in 1825.

The achievement of Independence in 1819, by eliminating the formal obstacles to the embrace of modernity, laid to bare the real obstacles. Colombia’s geography was a formidable obstacle. High transportation costs made self-sufficient and disconnected enclaves viable much like the description of the town of Macondo). Colombia had been wrestling with modernity since the eighteenth century. The dynamism of the capitalist revolution gave Colombia’s ruling classes a stark choice: integration with the modern industrial world or perishing in a backwater of barbarism. To incorporate the country into the world system they would have to look to the institutional, political, and economic models of Europe and the United States.

“As nineteenth century Colombians explored, described, and colonized their interior, they mapped racial hierarchy onto an emerging national geography composed of distinct localities and regions. This elaborated a racialized discourse of regional differentiation that assigned greater morality and progress to certain regions that they marked as “white”. Meanwhile, those places defined as “black” and “Indian” were associated with disorder, backwardness, and danger” technology and modernization became associated with race.

In Macondo, with the introduction of technology, a rising population, and modernization came the insomnia plague, which was characterized by forgetfulness. The people of Macondo forgot the words for objects (such as tables and chairs) and eventually forgot the significance or usages of these objects. Not only does this serve as a criticism by Marquez of the modernization of Colombia, but also of the plagues, characteristic of the Spanish conquest, which killed many indigenous people throughout the South American continent and the Caribbean. It is estimated that smallpox killed up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas (The Story of Smallpox and Other Deadly Eurasian Germs. Lion Television, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables /smallpox.html) during the conquest. The insomnia of the story represents the nostalgia for the better days of the past, which are now lost upon the residents of Macondo (as a metaphor for Colombia): days before the modernization of the town and before the spread of deadly disease.

The history of Colombia is one that has been marked by years of violence, from wars for independence to the modern-day rebel group commonly known as the FARC. The first major violence in Colombia was a product of the Bolivar Liberation during the years of 1810-1821 during which Simon Bolivar lead many battles against the Spanish in an attempt to free the country from Spanish rule. After independence, rather well-defined socioeconomic regions, rooted in such topographical facts as the division of the country three times over in a roughly north-south direction by parallel spurs of the Andes mountain chain, came into being in Colombia. During the nineteenth century, the existence of several powerful regional centers undoubtedly contributed to civil disorder . Politically, the relative dispersion of the population and of economic resources caused difficulties for the coherence of the government’s modernizing programs.

In 1934 a reformist wave brought to the presidency Dr. Alfonso Lopez by unanimous Liberal choice. He inaugurated the policy of La Revolucion en Marcha, a revolution characterized by labor reform and social legislation, which angered many Conservatives. In August of 1946, Mariano Ospina Perez took office as the first Conservative president of Colombia. This marked the start of a political breakdown that drew the people under increasingly undemocratic rule . On April 9, 1948, influential and celebrated Liberal candidate was assassinated, sparking the period of Colombia’s history known as “la Violencia”.

By the mid-1960’s, Colombia had witnessed in excess of two hundred thousand politically motivated violent deaths. La Violencia, 1946-66, can be broken into five stages: it began in the revival of political violence before and after the presidential election of 1946; it blossomed in the popular urban upheavals generated by Gaitan’s assassination; it transformed into open guerrilla war directed first against Conservative government of Ospina Perez Gomez; it continued amidst the incomplete attempts at pacification and negotiation resulting from the Rojas Pinilla (who had ousted Gomez); and lived on in the disjointed fighting under the Liberal/Conservative coalition of the “National Front,” which came into power in 1958 and lasted until 1974.

The politically charged violence characteristic of Colombia’s history is paralleled in One Hundred Years of Solitude through the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who wages war against the Conservatives who are facilitating the rise to power of the foreign imperialists. The wealthy banana plantation owners (Marquez’s version of the United Fruit Co.) set up their own dictatorial police force, which brutally attacks citizens for even the slightest offenses.

The use of real events and Colombian history by Garcia Marquez makes One Hundred Years of Solitude an excellent example of magical realism. Not only are the events of the story an interweaving of reality and fiction, but the novel as a whole tells the history of Colombia from a critical perspective using magical realism. In this way, the novel compresses several centuries of Latin American history into a manageable text.

Symbolism and metaphors

A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude 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". "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 existance. "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.

The Ghosts' that haunt the people of Macondo are symbols of an inescapable past."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".

Marquez uses colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used colours and they are symbols of imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents a search for economic wealth.

The glass city is an image that comes to Jose Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the ill fate of Macondo. 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.

Overall, there is an underlying pattern of Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It could be 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. This archive narrates the story of a Latin America discovered only by the voyager, 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. Melquiades, 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”

Characters

Buendía Family Tree

First generation

José Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and the founder of Macondo. Buendía leaves Riohacha, Colombia with his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, after the murdering of Prudencio Aguilar in a duel. One night camping at the side of a river, Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo and decides to establish their town in this location.

Úrsula Iguarán is one of the two matriarchs of the Buendía family and is wife to José Arcadio Buendía.

Second generation

José Arcadio

José Arcadio Buendía's firstborn son, José Arcadio seems to have inherited his father's headstrong, impulsive mannerisms. He eventually leaves the family to chase a Gypsy girl and unexpectedly returns many years later as an enormous man covered in tattoos, claiming that he'd 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's second son 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 children by unknown women.

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.

Amaranta

The third child of José Arcadio Buendía, Amaranta grows up as a companion of her adopted sister Rebeca; her feelings toward Rebeca, however, turn sour over Pietro Crespi, whom both sisters intensely desire in their teenage years. Amaranta dies a lonely and virginal spinster, but comfortable in her existence after having finally accepted what she had become.

Rebeca

Rebeca is the orphaned daughter of Ursula Iguaran's second cousins. 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 Visitacion and Cataure in the Guajiro or Wayuu language. Jose Arcadio's mysterious death is inextricably linked to Rebeca, who lives in seclusion for the rest of her life.

Third generation

Arcadio

Arcadio is José Arcadio's illegitimate son by Pilar Ternera. 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. 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 the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Pilar Ternera. He joins his father in several wars before deserting to return to Macondo. He deserted because he is obsessed with his aunt, Amaranta, who raised him since his birth. 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. 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 the government, which 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 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 retarded. 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. Too beautiful and, arguably, too wise for the world, Remedios ascends into the sky one morning, while folding laundry.

José Arcadio Segundo

José Arcadio Segundo is the twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, the children of Arcadio and Santa Sofía. 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 Melquiades, and tutoring the young Aureliano. He dies at the exact instant that his twin does.

Aureliano Segundo

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 search for a buried treasure, which nearly drives him to insanity. He dies of throat cancer 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 Ursula's earlier comment that they had been switched at birth). Aureliano Segundo represents Colombia's economy: gaining and losing weight according to the situation at the time.

Fernanda del Carpio

Fernanda is the only major character (except for Rebeca and the First generation) not from Macondo. She comes from a ruined, aristocratic family that kept her isolated from the world. She was chosen as the most beautiful of 5000 girls. Fernanda is brought to Macondo to compete with Remedios for the title of Queen of the carnival after her father promises her she will be the Queen of Madagascar. After the fiasco, she marries Aureliano Segundo and 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 he dies, taking care of the household until her death.

Fernanda is never accepted by anyone in the Buendía household who 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 Aureliano, whom she tries to isolate from the whole world.

Fifth generation

Renata Remedios (Meme)

Meme is the second child and first daughter of Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo. 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 later she gives birth to a son, Aureliano, at the convent. He is sent to live with the Buendías. She dies of old age in a hospital in Krakow.

José Arcadio (II)

José Arcadio, named after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, follows the trend of previous Arcadios. He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to become Pope. He returns from Rome without having become a priest. Eventually, he discovers buried treasure, 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.

Amaranta Úrsula

Amaranta Úrsula is the third child of Fernanda and Aureliano. 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 elder husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs him of her passionate affair with her nephew, Aureliano. She dies of hemorragia, after she has given birth to the last of the Buendia line.

Sixth generation

Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II)

Aureliano Babilonia is the illegitimate child of Meme. 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 her 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 Mequiades' parchments.

Seventh generation

Aureliano (III)

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 that Aureliano Babilonia eventually translates, before dying a second time. This time he drowns in the river near Macondo. He is buried in a grand ceremony organized by the Buendías.

Pilar Ternera

Pilar is a local woman who sleeps with the brothers Aureliano and José Arcadio. She becomes mother of their sons, Aureliano and José Arcadio. Pilar reads the future with cards, and every so often makes an accurate, though vague, prediction. She has close ties with the Buendias 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 very last days of Macondo.

The word "Ternera" in Spanish signifies veal or calf, which is fitting considering the way she is treated by Aureliano, Jose Arcadio, and Arcadio. Also, it could be a play on the word "Ternura", which in Spanish means "Tenderness". Pilar is always presented as a very loving figure, and the author often uses names in a similar fashion.

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.

Petra Cotes

Petra is a dark-skinned 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. She briefly dates both of them before her husband dies. 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.

Mr. Herbert and Mr. Brown

Mr. Herbert is a gringo who showed 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 Mr. 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. That event is likely based on the Banana massacre, that took place in Santa Marta, Colombia in 1928.

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 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 him of her love for Aureliano Babilonia Buendía. Gastón takes the news in stride, only asking that they ship him his velocipede.

Gabriel García Márquez

He is only a minor character in the novel but he has the distinction of bearing 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.

Major themes

The subjectivity of reality and Magical 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 magical 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 and a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characteres are fabricated. However the message that Marquez intends to deliever explains a true history. Marquez utilizes his fanticle story as an expression of reality. "In One Hundred Years of Solitde myth and history overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. Marquez’s novel can furthermore be referred to as anthropology, where truth is found in language and myth. What is real and what is fiction. There are three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling mythical heroes, and supernatural elements" Magical realism is inherent in the novel-achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. This magical 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, for example. Furthermore, once in it, the reader must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author presents to him or her.

García Márquez achieves a perfect blend of the real with the magical through the masterful use of tone and narration. By maintaining the same tone throughout the novel, Márquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary. His condensation of and lackadaisical manner in describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is, thereby perfectly 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 he or she to become accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel .

In context with history of Latin America

The novel points out that the state of Latin America is the result of the inability to obtain the confidence to construct a meaningful sense of direction and progression. The tragedy of Latin America is that it lacks its identity and self-preservation because of its past five hundred years of colonialism. There is an endless repetition of violence, repression, exploitation and loss of authenticity. The reality of Latin America is presented as a reoccurring fantastical world in the novel, a vacuum where the characters have no chance of survival. The desire for change and forward movement exists in Macondo (as it does in the countries of Latin America), but just as history repeats itself, the forward movement is never completely executed. This is what Marquez contributes to the solitude of Latin America.

The fluidity of time

One Hundred Years of Solitude 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, a history of the town as a succession of the same mistakes and 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.

Literary significance, reception and recognition

One Hundred Years of Solitude has received universal recognition.The novel has been awarded Italy’s Chianciano Award, France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger, Venezuela’s Romulo Gallegos Prize, and the Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Added to the least was the honorary LL.D. from Columbia University for the author. All these awards set the stage for García Márquez’s 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.

García Márquez is said to have a gift for blending the everyday and the miraculous, the historical and the fabulous, psychological realism and surreal flights of fancy; One Hundred Years of Solitude has influenced neary every important novelist aroudn the world It is a revolutionary novel that provided a looking glass into the thoughts and beliefs of Gabriel García Márquez, 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." Gabriel García Márquez

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Márquez addressed the significance of his writing and proposed its role to be more than just literary expression.

"I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude." "Gabriel García Márquez "

• In 1970, reviewing the book in the National Observer, William Kennedy hailed One Hundred Years of Solitude as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
• In addition to García Márquez's Nobel Prize for Literature for his oeuvre as a whole, One Hundred Years of Solitude was awarded France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1969 and Venezuela's Rómulo Gallegos Prize for literature in 1972.
• 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.

According to Antonio Sacoto, professor at The City College of the City University of New York, One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered as one of the five key novels in Hispanic American literature. (Together with El señor Presidente, Pedro Páramo, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, y La ciudad los perros). These novels, representative of the boom allow Hispanic American literature to reach the quality of North American and European literature, with its technical quality, rich themes, linguistic innovations, and the list goes on.

Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, Garcia Marquez is able to define clear themes; maintaining individual character identities, and use different narrative techniques, from third person narrators to specific point of view narrators and even stream of consciousness; cinematographic techniques are also employed, with the idea of the montage and the close-up; combining the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and tragic, reality in all its historic and politic facets with the mythic and magical American world; and lastly, the human comedy of a family, town, and country unveils itself to show us its problems. This is all presented in what is known as Garcia Marquez’s art of narrating, because the novel never ceases to be at its most interesting point.

The characters in the novel are never defined; they are not created from a mold. Instead, they are developed and formed throughout the novel. All characters are individualized, with many characteristics that differentiate them from others.

The novel, with a rich imagination achieved by its rhythmic tone, narrative, and fascinating character creation, is truly a thematic quarry, where the trivial and anecdotal, the historic and political, the wars and plagues, are all combined. From this great pool of themes, we can find violence, incest, and heat. (260)

Criticisms

Style

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have both received many critical criticisms and reviews. Harold Bloom says “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.”

Inspitations

Garcia Marquez has been accused of using many texts as his inspirations for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of these, the most well-known is Mario Vargas Llosa’s Yoknapatawpha David T. Haberly alleges that “strong cases have been made for Faulkner, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Defoe’s Diary of the Plague Year, and one which has not been mentioned is Chateaubriand’s Atala.” Hopkins backs his statement with evidence that Atala was available for Spanish-speaking audiences before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and makes comparisons between the plot of the two stories and some of the characters.

Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes

Critics have also speculated the potential of Marquez harboring ideals of marianismo, adhering to sexist stereotypes, and reinforcing these stereotypes and sexist attitudes in Cien Anos de Soledad through his portrayal of female characters as domestic housewives. This potentially sexist view also can be viewed as Marquez’s profound reflection on the social and cultural realities that exist in Latin America in terms of how women were viewed, and in particular, in Colombia. “What sort of values does Ursula symbolize? They are these: middle class stinginess, stupidity, superstition, insanity, reactionary activism, etc.” “There are numerous episodes and statements in the book which reinforce the patriarchical values of the story” . “One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the traditional Latin American role of women as adjuncts to men and implies neither qualitative awareness nor literary criticism of the restrictive political and economic systems and notions (ie marianismo) that perpetuate such notions. As a whole, the women of Macondo are pictured as male-defined, biological reproducers or sexually pleasing objects who are treated thematically as accessories to the men who actually shape and control the world.”

McOndo Movement

Internal references

In the novel's final chapter, Márquez references 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 references 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

• Shuji Terayama's play One Hundred Years of Solitude (百年の孤独, originally performed by the Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe), as well as his film Farewell to the Ark (さらば箱舟) are loose (and not officially authorized) adaptations of the novel by García Marquez transplanted into the realm of Japanese culture and history.

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has had such a big impact on the literature world, and although this novel is the author's best selling and most translated around the world, there have been no movies produced about it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has never agreed to sell the rights for producing such film, even though his novel has inspired many to write and has more than enough themes to work on in the film industry.

External links

• "The Solitude of Latin America", Nobel lecture by Gabriel García Márquez, 8 December 1982
• "Memory and Prophecy, Illusion and Reality Are Mixed and Made to Look the Same", review by Robert Kiely, The New York Times, March 8, 1970.
• "On Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude", lecture by Ian Johnston, Malaspina University College, March 28, 1995
• Book Summary of One Hundred Years of Solitude
• One Hundred Years of Solitude Book Notes from Literapedia