Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Context: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a post colonial novel by Gabriel García Márquez. The novel seems to jump back and forth in time. The novel has been termed as the foremost example of his magic realism style and masterpiece. It is an epic story of a total of 7 generations of the Buendia family spanning across ten decades of a turbulent history of Latin America, right from the postcolonial period of 1820s to the 1920s. Macondo the utopian city was built amidst a swamp, by Patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia.
Synopsis: The story starts with José Arcadio Buendía and Ursula, who fall in love and make a decision to marry each other without the permission of their families. The stressful Ursula feel that incest is wrong and that it would lead to a pig tailed baby, hence she not ready for the marriage. Once in a cockfight, Jose becomes the winner and Prudencio Aguilar loses and teases him that his wife is not putting out. In anger, Jose kills him and has sex with Ursula. When Prudencios ghost begins haunting Ursuala and Arcadio they pack up and go with their friends to Macondo, a new city. Their plan to set up a town close to the sea, eventually doesn’t work.
Hucksters and gypsies get attracted to the prosperous town. The stand-in for the author, Melquiades, an old writer also visits Macondo. The town gets destroyed by a tropical storm that lasted for almost 5 years. Physical decrepitude and depravity of the family start matching up by the fifth Buendia generation. All traces of the city are erased eventually by a hurricane. The narrator is revealed as Melquiades towards the end of the novel. Text of the novel is basically the mysterious manuscripts of the author.
Other works by the Author:
Novels
1962 – In Evil Hour
1975 – The Autumn of the Patriarch
1985 – Love in the Time of Cholera
1989 – The General in His Labyrinth
1994 – Of Love and Other Demons
Novellas
1955 – Leaf Storm
1961 – No One Writes to the Colonel
1972 – The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother
1981 – Chronicle of a Death Foretold
2004 – Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Short Story Collections
1947 – Eyes of a Blue Dog
1962 – Big Mama’s Funeral
1972 – The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother
1984 – Collected Stories
1993 – Strange Pilgrims
1955 –A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Non-fiction
1970 – The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
1982 – The Solitude of a Latin America
1982 – The Fragrance of Guava
1986 – Clandestine in Chile
1991 – Changing the History of Africa: Angola and Namibia
1996 – News of a Kidnapping
1998 – A Country for Children
2002 – Living to Tell the Tale
2019 – The Scandal of the Century: Selected Journalistic Writings, 1950 -1984