One day in 1965, while driving to Acapulco
for a vacation with his family,
Colombian journalist Gabriel García
Márquez abruptly turned his car around,
asked his wife to take care of the
family’s finances for the coming months,
and returned home.
The beginning of a new book
had suddenly come to him:
“Many years later,
as he faced the firing squad,
Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember
that distant afternoon
when his father took him to discover ice.”
Over the next eighteen months,
those words would blossom
into One Hundred Years of Solitude.
A novel that would go on
to bring Latin American literature
to the forefront
of the global imagination,
earning García Márquez
the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.
What makes One Hundred Years of Solitude
so remarkable?
The novel chronicles the fortunes
and misfortunes
of the Buendía family
over seven generations.
With its lush, detailed sentences,
large cast of characters,
and tangled narrative,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is not an easy book to read.
But it’s a deeply rewarding one,
with an epic assortment
of intense romances,
civil war,
political intrigue,
globe-trotting adventurers,
and more characters
named Aureliano than you’d think possible.
Yet this is no mere historical drama.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is one of the most famous examples
of a literary genre
known as magical realism.
Here, supernatural events or abilities
are described in a realistic
and matter-of-fact tone,
while the real events of human life
and history
reveal themselves
to be full of fantastical absurdity.
Surreal phenomena within the
fictional village of Macondo
intertwine seamlessly with events taking
place in the real country of Colombia.
The settlement begins
in a mythical state of isolation,
but is gradually exposed
to the outside world,
facing multiple calamities along the way.
As years pass,
characters grow old and die,
only to return as ghosts,
or to be seemingly reincarnated
in the next generation.
When the American fruit company
comes to town,
so does a romantic mechanic who is
always followed by yellow butterflies.
A young woman up and floats away.
Although the novel moves forward
through subsequent generations,
time moves in an almost cyclical manner.
Many characters have similar names
and features to their forebears,
whose mistakes they often repeat.
Strange prophecies
and visits from mysterious gypsies
give way to the skirmishes
and firing squads of repeated civil wars.
An American fruit company opens
a plantation near the village
and ends up massacring thousands
of striking workers,
mirroring the real-life
‘Banana Massacre’ of 1928.
Combined with the novel’s magical realism,
this produces a sense
of history as a downward spiral
the characters seem powerless to escape.
Beneath the magic is a story
about the pattern of Colombian
and Latin American history
from colonial times onward.
This is a history that
the author experienced firsthand.
Gabriel García Márquez grew up
in a Colombia torn apart by civil conflict
between its Conservative
and Liberal political parties.
He also lived in an autocratic Mexico
and covered the 1958 Venezuelan
coup d’état as a journalist.
But perhaps his biggest influences
were his maternal grandparents.
Nicolás Ricardo Márquez was a
decorated veteran of the Thousand Days War
whose accounts of the rebellion against
Colombia's conservative government
led Gabriel García Márquez
to a socialist outlook.
Meanwhile, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes’
omnipresent superstition
became the foundation
of One Hundred Years of Solitude’s style.
Their small house in Aracataca
where the author spent his childhood
formed the main inspiration for Macondo.
With One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Gabriel García Márquez
found a unique way
to capture the unique history
of Latin America.
He was able to depict the strange reality
of living in a post-colonial society,
forced to relive
the tragedies of the past.
In spite of all this fatalism,
the novel still holds hope.
At his Nobel Lecture,
García Marquez reflected
on Latin America’s long history
of civil strife and rampant iniquity.
Yet he ended the speech by affirming the
possibility of building a better world,
to quote, “where no one will be able
to decide for others how they die,
where love will prove true
and happiness be possible,
and where the races condemned
to one hundred years of solitude
will have, at last and forever,
a second chance on earth."
