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One day in 1965, while driving to Acapulco
for a vacation with his family,

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Colombian journalist Gabriel García 
Márquez abruptly turned his car around,

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asked his wife to take care of the
family’s finances for the coming months,

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and returned home.

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The beginning of a new book 
had suddenly come to him:

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“Many years later, 
as he faced the firing squad,

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Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember 
that distant afternoon

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when his father took him to discover ice.”

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Over the next eighteen months,

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those words would blossom 
into One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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A novel that would go on 
to bring Latin American literature

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to the forefront 
of the global imagination,

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earning García Márquez 
the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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What makes One Hundred Years of Solitude 
so remarkable?

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The novel chronicles the fortunes
and misfortunes

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of the Buendía family 
over seven generations.

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With its lush, detailed sentences,

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large cast of characters,

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and tangled narrative,

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One Hundred Years of Solitude 
is not an easy book to read.

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But it’s a deeply rewarding one,

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with an epic assortment 
of intense romances,

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civil war,

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political intrigue,

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globe-trotting adventurers,

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and more characters 
named Aureliano than you’d think possible.

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Yet this is no mere historical drama.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude 
is one of the most famous examples

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of a literary genre 
known as magical realism.

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Here, supernatural events or abilities

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are described in a realistic 
and matter-of-fact tone,

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while the real events of human life 
and history

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reveal themselves 
to be full of fantastical absurdity.

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Surreal phenomena within the
fictional village of Macondo

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intertwine seamlessly with events taking
place in the real country of Colombia.

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The settlement begins 
in a mythical state of isolation,

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but is gradually exposed 
to the outside world,

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facing multiple calamities along the way.

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As years pass, 
characters grow old and die,

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only to return as ghosts,

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or to be seemingly reincarnated 
in the next generation.

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When the American fruit company 
comes to town,

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so does a romantic mechanic who is
always followed by yellow butterflies.

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A young woman up and floats away.

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Although the novel moves forward 
through subsequent generations,

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time moves in an almost cyclical manner.

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Many characters have similar names 
and features to their forebears,

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whose mistakes they often repeat.

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Strange prophecies 
and visits from mysterious gypsies

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give way to the skirmishes 
and firing squads of repeated civil wars.

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An American fruit company opens 
a plantation near the village

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and ends up massacring thousands 
of striking workers,

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mirroring the real-life 
‘Banana Massacre’ of 1928.

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Combined with the novel’s magical realism,

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this produces a sense 
of history as a downward spiral

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the characters seem powerless to escape.

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Beneath the magic is a story 
about the pattern of Colombian

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and Latin American history 
from colonial times onward.

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This is a history that 
the author experienced firsthand.

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Gabriel García Márquez grew up
in a Colombia torn apart by civil conflict

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between its Conservative 
and Liberal political parties.

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He also lived in an autocratic Mexico

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and covered the 1958 Venezuelan 
coup d’état as a journalist.

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But perhaps his biggest influences 
were his maternal grandparents.

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Nicolás Ricardo Márquez was a
decorated veteran of the Thousand Days War

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whose accounts of the rebellion against
Colombia's conservative government

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led Gabriel García Márquez 
to a socialist outlook.

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Meanwhile, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes’
omnipresent superstition

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became the foundation 
of One Hundred Years of Solitude’s style.

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Their small house in Aracataca 
where the author spent his childhood

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formed the main inspiration for Macondo.

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With One Hundred Years of Solitude,

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Gabriel García Márquez 
found a unique way

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to capture the unique history 
of Latin America.

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He was able to depict the strange reality 
of living in a post-colonial society,

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forced to relive 
the tragedies of the past.

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In spite of all this fatalism,
the novel still holds hope.

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At his Nobel Lecture,

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García Marquez reflected 
on Latin America’s long history

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of civil strife and rampant iniquity.

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Yet he ended the speech by affirming the
possibility of building a better world,

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to quote, “where no one will be able
to decide for others how they die,

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where love will prove true

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and happiness be possible,

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and where the races condemned 
to one hundred years of solitude

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will have, at last and forever,
a second chance on earth."