Title: Cien Años de Soledad
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Original language: Spanish
Translation(s): 35 languages
Context: Cien Años de Soledad (1967) is a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. This remarkable, landmark, bestselling novel has been translated into English as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. Cien Años de Soledad presents the rise and fall of the Buendia family witnesses by societies in Latin America and how within a span of hundred years, Macondo collapses and emerges as new again. Name of the Buendia family is seen spanning across seven generations in the novel.
Synopsis: The novel is the tale of the Buendia family. The incongruous dispute between the need for love and the desire for solitude in imaginative and rich prose has been defined in this magical realism genre.
Absolutely a masterpiece, the novel captures different glories and phases in the history of humans and makes a great impact on the minds of young students studying literature. The theme of this novel is about two families experiencing different stages of life over hundred year period. It captures how the protagonist comes to grips with the past and ways in which the family witnesses doom with this obsession. A new world of the United States is presented by Macondo which seems more like the Promised Land to a lot of people at one point of time. However, it was accepted as another delusion during the course of history.
Other works by the Author:
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 Eréndira 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 Eréndira 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 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