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 (Template:Lang-es) 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 one of the most influential Latin American writers of all time.

Plot summary

The novel chronicles the seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo.It describes the founding of through to the destruction of the town of Macondo. José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula leave their home in Riohacha Colombia in hopes to find a new home.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. With the founding of Macondo, a series of extraordinary events takes place. All the events revolve around the Buendía family, who are unable to escape the re-occurrence of their self-inflicted misfortunes. This ultimately leads to the destruction of Macondo by a terrible hurricane. The hurricane is a symbol of the cyclic turmoil entrapped within Macondo and everything that has occurred there.

Symbolism and metaphors

One of the most dominant themes of the novel is the neverending and inescapable repetition of history throughout time 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 evokes 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 symbolos 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 imperialismo and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. The gold signifies a search for economic wealth whereas the yellow represents a search for economic wealth.

The glass city is an image that comes to Jose Buendia in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also the symbol of the ill fate of Macondo. Images such as the glass city and ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined and is therefore fated for destruction.

The Archive is a symbol of what is linear and at the same time of symbol of the Latin America that was only discovered by the voyager but had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation to the history and a decoding instrument. Melquiades, the keeper of the archive, represents both the whimsical and the literary, literature ironic critical and contradicting to delusion.

Characters

Buendía Family Tree

First generation

José Arcadio Buendía

The patriarch of the Buendía family and a chief founder of Macondo. José Arcadio 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

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, from Manaure, the capital of La Guajira. 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), and sucking her finger. She arrives carrying a canvas bag containing her parents' bones and seems not to understand or speak Spanish, but responds to questions asked by Visitacion and Cataure in the Guajiro or Wayuu language.Jose Arcadio's mysterious death is linked inextricably 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, but assumes leadership of Macondo when Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves, upon Aureliano's request. He becomes a tyrannical dictator and uses his schoolchildren as his personal army, and Macondo becomes subject to his whims. When the Liberal forces in Macondo fall, Arcadio is shot shortly after the defeat by the Conservative firing squad.

Aureliano José

Aureliano José is the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, also by Pilar Ternera. He joins his father in several wars, but deserts and returns to Macondo because he is obsessed with his aunt, Amaranta, who raised him since his birth. Aureliano José is shot to death by a Conservative captain of the guard midway through the wars.

Santa Sofía de la Piedad

Santa Sofía is a beautiful virgin girl and the daughter of a shopkeeper, hired by Pilar Ternera to have sex with her son Arcadio. She becomes the wife of Arcadio and the mother of Remedios the Beauty, José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo, and 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 of whom he stays with for only one night.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 a revenge against the Colonel, all are assassinated by the government, identified 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, after being refused admittance by relatives who have never met him.

Fourth generation

Remedios the Beauty

Remedios is Arcadio and Santa Sofía's first child, and she inherits her mother's beauty. It is said she's 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. This ability to penetrate flamboyant social construct results in Remedios leading a simple life that would be considered idiosyncratic. She rejects clothing and beauty, sewing a cassock as her only clothing, and shaving her foot-long hair to not have to comb it. Ironically, it is her touch with base human instinct that perpetuates her as an object of lust for more men, whom she treats with complete innocence and no reservations. 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, even 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, eventually almost going insane. He wastes away, and 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). He 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) that does not originate in Macondo. She comes from a ruined aristocrat family that kept her isolated from the world in her school and is an extremely beautiful woman; she was chosen as the most beautiful girl among 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 and manages Buendía affairs with an iron fist. She has three children by Aureliano Segundo (José Arcadio, Renata Remedios aka Meme and Amaranta Úrsula), and 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, and though the Buendías do nothing to rebel against her inflexible conservatism, she is generally regarded by the family as an outsider, and a "stuck up highlander". In the course of the novel, Fernanda's 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. She is the only one who knows of the true parentage of Aureliano Babilonia until she reveals to her son Jose Arcadio in her letters.

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 play the clavichord and do nothing else, she is sent to school and receives her performance degree along with recognition for her excellent academic grades. 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, even befriending women from the banana plantation.

Meme meets and falls in love with Mauricio Babilonia, a handsome mechanic of Gypsy blood working for the banana plantation, but when Fernanda finds out that they were having sexual relations, she arranges for Mauricio to be shot by claiming that he was a chicken thief, and 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 and determination. Several months later we know she was pregnant because she gives birth to a son, Aureliano, at the convent; he is sent to live with the Buendias. She dies of old age in an unknown hospital in Krakow.

José Arcadio (II)

José Arcadio, named after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, follows the trend of the previous Arcadios. He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to become the Pope. Returning home from Rome (without having become a priest) after the death of his mother, he discovers a buried treasure and begins to waste it 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, Úrsula, who dies when she is only a child: willful, cheerful, tries to work hard for the sake of her happiness and the others. 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 and early adolescence. She returns home from Europe with an elder husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs him of her passionate affair with Aureliano, her nephew, which later evolves into love. She dies of hemorragia, after she has given birth to the last of the Buendia line.

Sixth generation

Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II)

Aureliano is the illegitimate child of Meme. He is sent to the house and hidden from everyone by his grandmother, Fernanda. He is strikingly similar to his namesake, the Colonel, and has the same character patterns as well: taciturn, silent, 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 at the house. 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's 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." He is assumed to have died in the great wind that destroys the nearly deserted town that hits the moment he finished reading Mequiades' parchments.

Seventh generation

Aureliano (III)

The child of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula. The child was 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). The mother died after giving birth to her son, and due to the negligence of his grief-stricken father, the son is devoured by ants. When he sees the corpse, Aureliano is hit with the realization of the parchment's meaning.

Others

Melquíades

Melquíades is one of a troop of Gypsies who would visit Macondo every year in March, displaying amazing items from around the world (note: a second, different Gypsy troop begins visiting the town bringing wonders such as magic carpets and ice along with the snake man that prompts Jose Arcadio's disappearance). 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 Buendias 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 to Macondo, and is buried in a grand ceremony organized by the Buendias.

After Melquiades' death, Marquez makes reference to one of his earlier short stories, Big Mama's Funeral.

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 and 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 claims Rebeca for his own wife and she accepts, 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, as well as the love of his life. She arrives in Macondo as a teenager with her first husband, who starts running the local lottery and dies few years before she meets the twins; she briefly dates both of them, mistaking them to be the same man, and after José Arcadio decides to leave her and never see her again, Aureliano Segundo gets her forgiveness and remains by her side. He continues to see her, even after his marriage, and eventually lives with her; this greatly embitters his wife, Fernanda del Carpio, even after she comes to publicly accept the fact. 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 banana company is run by the dictatorial Mr. Brown. Meme befriends his daughter, Patricia. When José Arcadio Segundo helps arrange a strike, the company traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them down in the town square, stacking the corpses on a secret train and dumping them into the sea. The banana company and the government completely cover up the event, and 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, but not before causing it to rain for four years, eleven months, and two days. 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, who is said to be a descendent of the Gypsies who used to 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, whom he met at the banana company when she accompanied some gringo girls to check on the new cars, until Fernanda discovers them and tries to end it. When Mauricio continues to sneak into the house to see her, Fernanda has him shot as a chicken thief. He spends the rest of his long life in solitude, confined to a bed due to paralysis. Meme, having endured the shock of having witnessed his crippling, goes mute and spends the rest of her life in a convent imposed by Fernanda. However, Meme is pregnant with the mechanic's son, Aureliano. The boy is delivered by a nun to the Buendia house in a basket.

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 very different from that place, and hence she will 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) Buendia. 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 that no one else believes in. 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 the history overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit the history to the reader. Marquez’s novel can furthermore be refered to as the 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 alluded to (foundations and origins), the characters resembling mythical heroes, and the supernatural elements"

In context with history 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 reifies 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, tend 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, which was first designed by Melquíades near the start of the story and remains essentially unchanged throughout its course as 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 like his son Colonel Aureliano Buendía, among a number of other means. A sense of inevitability prevails throughout the text, 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)

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.

Sources

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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