Why should you read "One Hundred Years of Solitude"? - Francisco Díez-Buzo

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