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,
arge cast of characters,
and tangled narrative,
100 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