hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez

Subsequently, José Arcadio Buendía experiments with new inventions, including alchemy and the astrolabe. The book opens as Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembers his childhood in Macondo, when his father José Arcadio Buendía was interested in all the inventions brought to town by travelers.

Rather than following a single protagonist through a linear set of events, the novel contains many plots and subplots that revolve around both the central characters of the Buendía family across generations and the side characters who interact with them. Time shifts constantly: Chapters are narrated out of chronological order, and the relative importance of events has little relation to how much attention they receive on the page. The novel is written in third-person-omniscient past tense. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of five generations of the Buendía family, from the founding of their lineage and the town of Macondo until both are wiped out by a hurricane. This novel is also an extended family saga, telling the story of five generations in the same family as it presents a veiled version of Colombian history.Ĭontent warning: Please note the presence of the following elements in the novel: Chapter 1 for derogatory language used to describe travelers Chapters 6 and 9 for self-harm Chapter 15 for mass violence Chapter 19 for a racist character and a scene of sexual violence and Chapter 20 for an infant death. This was a frequent narrative device in 1960s and 1970s Latin American Boom fiction-the era when translations of short stories and novels from the region “exploded” onto the global literary scene.

This is a pivotal text in the development of the technique of magical realism, which commonly uses fantastical narrative and imagery but intertwines these aspects of magic with realist elements, rather than presenting them as extraordinary. He examines postcolonial Colombia as Macondo experiences plagues, civil war, exploitation by foreign companies, and tensions with the impact of modernity. García Márquez’s epic novel examines 100 years through the lens of one fictional rural town, Macondo-the setting of numerous works by the author-and one fictional family, the Buendías.

Hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez