“One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

About the Novel

There is a legend Gabriel Garcia Marquez likes to tell about the writing of his most famous novel, One
Hundred Years of Solitude. He claims that he wrote the book barricaded in his study in Mexico, after
receiving a vision. One day, while he and his wife and children were in their car driving to Acapulco, he saw
that he "had to tell [his] story the way his grandmother used to tell hers, and that [he] was to start from that
afternoon in which a father took his child to discover ice." He made an abrupt U-turn on the highway, the
car never made it to Acapulco, and he locked himself in his study. Fifteen months later, he emerged with the
manuscript, only to meet his wife holding a stack of bills. They traded papers, and she put the manuscript in
the mail to his publisher.
Like everything Marquez writes, there is some truth and much fiction in this tale. The truth in the tale is that
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a very personal book for the author. It would not have been written if he
had not experienced the childhood he had. Marquez grew up with his maternal grandparents in Aracataca,
Colombia. His grandparents were cousins who moved to Aracataca from Riohacha at the end of the War of a
Thousand Days (1899-1902), a few years before a leafstorm. Marquez's childhood anecdotes tell of a big
house full of ghosts, conversations in code, and relatives who could foretell their own deaths. It was also a
house filled with guests and social events, shaded by almond trees and bursting with flowers. When
Marquez's grandfather died, Marquez was sent to live with his parents. In his grandfather's absence, his
grandmother, who was blind, could no longer keep up the house. It fell into a state of ruin, and red ants
destroyed the trees and flowers. Also early in his childhood, Marquez witnessed the massacre of striking
banana workers‹ workers at a plantation named Macondo‹ at a train station. The government made every
attempt to block information from the public and pacify the foreign plantation owners. Marquez was
horrified, and even more horrified when he reached high school and learned that the event had been deleted
from his history textbook.
Careful readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude will recognize many of these elements in the book; there
is no doubt that if Marquez had not grown up in Aracataca and had a keen ear, the novel would not exist. On
one hand, the context for the book is Marquez's own personal nostalgia‹ for childhood, for his grandparents,
for a big house filled with ghosts and laughter. On the other hand, the context for the book is Marquez's
political beliefs and the oft-brutal realities of growing up in a particularly tumultuous developing country.
Growing up in Colombia, which has a long and tragic socioeconomic history, Marquez learned about
politics and economics early on. In his conversations with other Latin American writers‹ the Mexican
novelist Carlos Fuentes was one of the writers who gave Marquez extensive feedback and advice on the
early chapters of Solitude‹ he developed his own theoretical views about writing and politics. He often
claims "The first duty of a writer is to write well"‹ implying that writing must not be polemical‹ but there is
no doubt that the economic history of Latin America, which is a history of inequality and exploitation, has
had a crucial impact on all of his writing.
Marquez's approach to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude‹ combining his own memories and
imagination with focused aesthetics and an eye for the tragic history of his country‹ has had an
immeasurable impact on writers of color worldwide. Coming at the time it did, in the midst of a boom in
Latin American writing, it was immediately recognized as one of the finest, if not the finest, offerings from
that period. More importantly, it crossed every boundary to becoming an international bestseller and
worldwide phenomenon. Even Latin American writers who found fault with it could not deny that it had
directed the attentions of the literary world to Latin America. The book was an immediate commerical and
critical success when it appeared in 1967, and has since been translated into 26 languages and sold millions
of copies worldwide.
Other writers of color from different traditions followed in Marquez's footsteps to draw attention to their
own countries and struggles. As critic Regina James says, "Solitude represented the marginal and the
primitive, yet it neither adopted the superior perspective of the Western anthropologist nor imitated an
imagined, alien innocenceŠ .many writers recognized their own ambivalent and difficult relationships with a
traditional culture. In much of the world, the unimaginably old coexists with the unbearably newŠ For
writers conscious of straddling two cultures, nostalgia for a simpler, primitive past vies with wonder at the
persistence of habits of thought, patterns of life, and modes of belief that surely ought to be extinct, mere
harmless fossils. Garcia Marquez turned puzzlement or outrage into ironic wonder, and he enhanced the
strangeness of the realŠ " Today, we see his influence in such celebrated writers as America's Toni
Morrison, India (and England)'s Salman Rushdie, and Trinidad's V.S. Naipaul.
The Story in Brief
Author's Note: One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a typical novel in that there is no single plot and no
single timeline. The author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has crucial thematic reasons for the unusual
construction of the novel. It is his intention to show that history moves not only in cycles but also in circles.
For this reason, there is no single main character in focus, nor does the novel follow a regular timeline. In
his quest to show how history moves in circles, Marquez gives virtually every member of the Buendia
family one of the following names: (men) Jose Arcadio, Aureliano (women) Ursula, Amaranta, Remedios.
This can sometimes be confusing to the reader, which is, after all, the point. In an effort to make matters less
confusing, Marquez has included a family tree at the beginning of the book, and he uses a slight variation on
these names for each different character.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is both the history of Macondo, a small town in an unnamed region of South
America, and the town's founders, the Buendia family. The book follows seven generations of the Buendias
and the rise and fall of Macondo. The family patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, founded the town with his
wife, Ursula Iguaran. Because Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran were cousins, they have a fear of
bearing children with pig's tails; this fear will linger over the book.
Jose Arcadio Buendia is an intrepid, curious man with a flair for exploration and the sciences. He delves into
one scientific quest after another and eventually loses his senses, forcing the men of the town to tie him to a
tree. Both his strengths and weaknesses are exhibited in the Buendia men throughout the novel, starting with
his sons Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. Jose Arcadio inherits his father's massive strength and implusiveness;
Aureliano inherits his strong ethical sense and his solitary intensity. Both these men go to their own
extremes: Jose Arcadio becomes the ultimate macho and dies mysteriously after usurping lands; Aureliano
(known in the novel as Colonel Aureliano Buendia) becomes one of the greatest and most notorious rebels
in the country during an extended period of civil war. Macondo, once an innocent paradise, becomes
acquainted with the outside world during the period of civil war. It is during this period that death and
bloodshed first comes to Macondo's door; the town remains linked to the outside world because of the fame
of Colonel Aureliano Buendia.
In contrast to her husband, Ursula Iguaran is fiercely practical and possessed of much common sense. She is
energetic, tenacious (she lives so long that she loses track of her age) and spends her life looking after the
family line. Unfortunately none of the female Buendias match her fortitude: Amaranta, her daughter, is
tenacious only in personal bitterness while her great-great-granddaughters Renata Remedios and Amaranta
Ursula are possessed of her energy but none of her common sense. The failure of the next generations to be
possessed of their ancestors' strength of character causes the family to falter as history and modernity storm
Macondo.
After the civil war, foreign imperialism comes in with devastating effects. White capitalists come to
Macondo and seem to usurp God's powers with their ability to change the seasons and the water flow. They
set up a banana plantation that exploits the residents of Macondo; when the workers organize and strike,
they are all systematically killed in a government-sponsored massacre. One of the Buendias, Jose Arcadio
Segundo, was a major organizer and could not face the world after this event.
For Macondo, too, the banana massacre brings major change. Rains begin the night of the massacre and do
not stop for almost five years; washing away the banana plantation and leaving Macondo in a state of
desperation. The impoverished town loses its importance and its modernity; from then on, the town exists in
a state of regression. For the Buendias, also, the rains signal the quickening speed of their downward spiral.
The older members of the family are lost in nostalgia; the younger ones are lost in debauchery and solitary
isolation. As the town is abandoned, the last members of the family succumb to incestuous desire and birth a
child with a pig's tail. At the very end of the book, it is revealed that the history of the Buendias has been
ordained since the beginning, and that they will never have a second chance.