One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad, 1967), by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia. The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames, a technique derived from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (as in The Garden of Forking Paths).

The widely acclaimed book, considered by many to be the author's masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and subsequently has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has sold more than 20 million copies.^[1][2] The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s,^[3] that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.

Biography and publication[link]

The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez was one of the four Latin American novelists first included in the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s; the other three writers were the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortázar, and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) earned García Márquez international fame as a novelist of the Magical Realism movement within the literatures of Latin America.^[4]

As a metaphoric, critical interpretation of Colombian history, from foundation to contemporary nation, One Hundred Years of Solitude presents different national myths throughout the story of the Buendía Family,^[5] whose spirit of adventure places them amidst the important actions of Colombian historical events — such as the nineteenth-century arguments for and against the Liberal political reformation of a colonial way of life; the arrival of the railway to a mountainous country; the Thousand Days War (Guerra de los Mil Días, 1899–1902); the corporate hegemony of the United Fruit Company ("American Fruit Company" in the story); the cinema; the automobile; and the military massacre of striking workers as government–labour relations policy.^[6]

Plot[link]

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of Macondo. The founding patriarch of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and Úrsula, his wife (and first cousin), leave Riohacha, Colombia, to find a better life and a new home. One night of their emigration journey, whilst camping on a riverbank, José Arcadio Buendía dreams of "Macondo", a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to found Macondo at the river side; after days of wandering the jungle, José Arcadio Buendía's founding of Macondo is utopic.^[1]

Founding patriarch José Arcadio Buendía believes Macondo to be surrounded by water, and from that island, he invents the world according to his perceptions.^[1] Soon after its foundation, Macondo becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events that involve the generations of the Buendía family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their periodic (mostly) self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, a hurricane destroys Macondo, the city of mirrors; just the cyclical turmoil inherent to Macondo. At the end of the story, a Buendía man deciphers an encrypted cipher that generations of Buendía family men had failed to decipher. The secret message informed the recipient of every fortune and misfortune lived by the Buendía Family generations.^[6]

Historical context[link]

The critical interpretation of Colombian history that is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude draws from the nationally agreed-upon history to establish the world of Macondo, where a man's will to power allows him to invent the world according to his perceptions.

El Conquistador: Vasco Núñez de Balboa

Before the Spanish colonisation of the Americas by "right of conquest", the northern region of South America that is contemporary Colombia had no culture akin to that of the (Peruvian) Incas, the (Central American) Mayas, or the (Mexican) Aztecs.^[7] That region was populated by the Tairona and Chibcha Indian tribes, who were organised as clans, from which derived the local monarchy who governed pre–Hispanic "Colombia".^[7] In 1509, Vasco Núñez de Balboa established the first settlement and is now named the first city of Colombia, as an advanced guard of the Spanish invasion and conquest.^[7] The founding of Macondo by the patriarchal Buendía Family is metaphor of the colonisation of the future "Colombia".

Simón Bolívar, Liberator of the Américas

Pablo Morillo, el Pacificador

After Gonzálo Jiménez de Quesada's conquest of the Chibchas in 1538, Bogotá became the center of colonial Spanish rule.^[8] In 1810, upon the collapse of the Spanish Empire in Colombia, provincial juntas soon arose to challenge the political authority of the national government in Bogotá; yet six years later, in 1816, the royalist armies of Count Pablo Morillo restored Spanish rule to Colombia. Three years later, in 1819, when Simón Bolívar began a second war of independence from the Spanish Empire, he proclaimed the supranational state of la Gran Colombia (Greater Colombia, 1819–31), its capital city was Bogotá, and comprised northern South America and Southern Central America (contemporary Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama), the previous Viceroyalty of New Granada.^[9]

Gran Colombia's Independence in 1819 revealed many obstacles to nationhood; the geography was a formidable obstacle to modernization, such as paved roads, thus, the high cost of transport facilitated the establishment of economically and politically discrete autonomous communities like Macondo.^[10] Colombian society had wrestled with Modernity and modernism since the eighteenth century, and the social and philosophic dynamism of the modernizing capitalist revolution presented the Colombian ruling classes with a choice: either progress into the modern industrial world or perish in backwater barbarism. To incorporate the country to the world, Colombians looked to the European and U.S. models of government, politics, and economy.^[11]

As nineteenth century Colombians explored, described, and colonized their interior, they mapped racial hierarchy onto an emerging national geography composed of distinct localities and regions. This created a racialized discourse of regional differentiation that assigned greater morality and progress to certain regions that they marked as "white". Meanwhile, those places defined as "black" and "Indian" were associated with disorder, backwardness, and danger; technology and modernization became associated with race.^[12]

Alfonso López Pumarejo, 21st President of Colombia

The nation of Colombia began violently — from Bolivarian wars for independence from empire to the contemporary Marxist–Leninist guerrillas of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The initial, Bolivarian, violence was for liberation (1810–21) from the Spanish Empire. After independence, there arose well-defined socio-economic regions, divided north-south, by parallel spurs of the Andes mountains, which contributed to continued civil and political instability, even after having expelled the Spanish Crown.^[13] Moreover, Colombia's geographically and culturally dispersed populations and natural resources much hindered the government's modernization of the country and the nation.^[13]

Mariano Ospina Pérez, 23rd President of Colombia

In 1934, the reformist President Dr. Alfonso López Pumarejo, unanimously voted to office by the Colombian Liberal Party, installed La Revolución en Marcha (The Revolution on the March), characterized by labour law and social services reforms benefitting the working class and the Indian peasants, much to the anger of the reactionary Conservatives. Twelve years later, in August 1946, Mariano Ospina Pérez assumed office as the first Conservative party President of Colombia — the beginning of the political dysfunction that degenerated to undemocratic authoritarian rule.^[14] Two years later, on 9 April 1948, the assassination of the popular and influential Liberal candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán began the decade period (1948–58) of Colombia's history known as la Violencia (the Violence), between the right-wing and the left-wing of the national political spectrum.

By the mid-1960s, the country had suffered some two hundred thousand assassinations; from 1946 to 1966, la Violencia had occurred in five stages: (i) resumption of political violence, before and after the presidential election of 1946; (ii) popular urban insurrection responding to the Gaitán assassination; (iii) guerrilla warfare — first against the Conservative government of Ospina Pérez; (iv) incomplete pacification and negotiation from army General Rojas Pinilla, who deposed Laureano Gómez; and (v) disjointed fighting under the Liberal–Conservative coalition of the "National Front," from 1958 to 1975.^[15]

In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the political violence characteristic of Colombian national history is paralleled in the life of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, wars against the treasonous Conservatives facilitating the politico-economic power of foreign imperialists in the national affairs of Colombia. The banana plantation owners (i.e. the United Fruit Company) possess a private police force with which the business corporation attacks Colombian citizens at will.^[16]

Technically, using of particular historical event and character narratively renders One Hundred Years of Solitude an exemplar work of magical realism, wherein the novel compresses centuries of cause and effect whilst telling an interesting story.^[5] Moreover, One Hundred Years of Solitude illustrates that contemporary Latin America has resulted from the absence of purposeful political organisation and will required for progress. The tragedy of Latin America is the lack of a definitive national identity, without which there is only self-destruction, not preservation. This might be partly attributed to five centuries of Spanish colonialism; nevertheless, the continual violence, repression, and exploitation, rob the Colombian of a definite identity. The historical reality of Latin American countries occurs as the recurring fantastical world of Macondo. The desire for change and progress exists in Macondo as in the countries of Latin America, however, the story's temporal cycles symbolize the nationalist tendency for repeating history.

Symbolism and metaphors[link]

A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. "The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history".^[17] "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions.^[17]

The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. "Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities.The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.^[17]

García Márquez uses colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used colors and they are symbols of imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.^[18]

The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the ill fate of Macondo. Higgins writes that, "By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history"^[1] Images such as the glass city and the ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined and is, therefore, fated for destruction.^[17]

Overall, there is an underlying pattern of Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It could be said that the novel is one of a number of texts that "Latin American culture has created to understand itself".^[19] In this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive. This archive narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. Melquíades, the keeper of the historical archive in the novel, represents both the whimsical and the literary.^[19] Finally, "the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain"^[6]

Characters[link]

First generation[link]

José Arcadio Buendía

Jose Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and the founder of Macondo.^[20] Buendía leaves Riohacha, Colombia with his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, after murdering Prudencio Aguilar in a duel.^[20] One night camping at the side of a river, Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo and decides to establish the town in this location. Jose Arcadio is an introspective, inquisitive man of massive strength and energy who spends more time on his scientific pursuits than with his family. He flirts with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and community.

Úrsula Iguarán

Úrsula Iguarán is one of the two matriarchs of the Buendía family and is wife to José Arcadio Buendía.^[20] She lives to be over 130 years old and she oversees the Buendía household through six of the seven generations documented in the novel. She exhibits a very strong character and often succeeds where the men of her family fail, for example finding a route to the outside world from Macondo.

Second generation[link]

José Arcadio

José Arcadio Buendía's firstborn son, José Arcadio seems to have inherited his father's headstrong, impulsive mannerisms.^[20] He eventually leaves the family to chase a Gypsy girl and unexpectedly returns many years later as an enormous man covered in tattoos, claiming that he's sailed the seas of the world. He marries his adopted sister Rebeca, causing his banishment from the mansion, and he dies from a mysterious gunshot wound, days after saving his brother from execution.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía

José Arcadio Buendía's second son and the first person to be born in Macondo.^[20] He was thought to have premonitions because everything he said came true.^[20] He represents not only a warrior figure but also an artist due to his ability to write poetry and create finely crafted golden fish. During the wars he fathered 17 sons by unknown women.^[20]

Remedios Moscote

Remedios was the youngest daughter of the town's Conservative administrator, Don Apolinar Moscote.^[20] Her most striking physical features are her beautiful skin and her emerald-green eyes. The future Colonel Aureliano falls in love with her, despite her extreme youth. She dies shortly after the marriage from a blood poisoning illness during her pregnancy.

Amaranta

The third child of José Arcadio Buendía, Amaranta grows up as a companion of her adopted sister Rebeca.^[20] However, her feelings toward Rebeca turn sour over Pietro Crespi, whom both sisters intensely desire in their teenage years. Amaranta dies a lonely and virginal spinster, but comfortable in her existence after having finally accepted what she had become.^[20]

Rebeca

Rebeca is the orphaned daughter of Ursula Iguaran's second cousins.^[20] At first she is extremely timid, refuses to speak, and has the habits of eating earth and whitewash from the walls of the house, a condition known as pica. She arrives carrying a canvas bag containing her parents' bones and seems not to understand or speak Spanish. However, she responds to questions asked by Visitacion and Cataure in the Guajiro or Wayuu language. She falls in love with and marries her adoptive brother José Arcadio after his return from traveling the world. After his mysterious and untimely death, she lives in seclusion for the rest of her life.

Third generation[link]

Arcadio

Arcadio is José Arcadio's illegitimate son by Pilar Ternera.^[20] He is a schoolteacher who assumes leadership of Macondo after Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves.^[20] He becomes a tyrannical dictator and uses his schoolchildren as his personal army and Macondo soon becomes subject to his whims. When the Liberal forces in Macondo fall, Arcadio is shot by a Conservative firing squad.^[20]

Aureliano José

Aureliano José is the illegitimate son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Pilar Ternera.^[20] He joins his father in several wars before deserting to return to Macondo. He deserted because he is obsessed with his aunt, Amaranta, who raised him since his birth. He is eventually shot to death by a Conservative captain midway through the wars.^[20]

Santa Sofía de la Piedad

Santa Sofía is a beautiful virgin girl and the daughter of a shopkeeper.^[20] She is hired by Pilar Ternera to have sex with her son Arcadio, her eventual husband.^[20] She is taken in along with her children by the Buendías after Arcadio's execution. After Úrsula's death she leaves unexpectedly, not knowing her destination.

17 Aurelianos

During his 32 civil war campaigns, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has 17 sons by 17 different women, each named after their father.^[20] Four of these Aurelianos (A. Triste, A. Serrador, A. Arcaya and A. Centeno) stay in Macondo and become a permanent part of the family. Eventually, as revenge against the Colonel, all are assassinated by the government, which identified them by the mysteriously permanent Ash Wednesday cross on their foreheads. The only survivor of the massacre is A. Amador, who escapes into the jungle only to be assassinated at the doorstep of his father's house many years later.

Fourth generation[link]

Remedios the Beauty

Remedios the Beauty is Arcadio and Santa Sofía's first child.^[20] It is said she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, and unintentionally causes the deaths of several men who love or lust over her.^[20] She appears to most of the town as naively innocent, and some come to think that she is mentally retarded. However, Colonel Aureliano Buendía believes she has inherited great lucidity: "It is as if she's come back from twenty years of war", he said. She rejects clothing and beauty. Too beautiful and, arguably, too wise for the world, Remedios ascends into the sky one afternoon in the 4pm sun, while folding Fernanda's white sheet.

José Arcadio Segundo

José Arcadio Segundo is the twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, the children of Arcadio and Santa Sofía.^[20] Úrsula believes that the two were switched in their childhood, as José Arcadio begins to show the characteristics of the family's Aurelianos, growing up to be pensive and quiet. He plays a major role in the banana worker strike, and is the only survivor when the company massacres the striking workers.^[20] Afterward, he spends the rest of his days studying the parchments of Melquiades, and tutoring the young Aureliano. He dies at the exact instant that his twin does.^[20]

Aureliano Segundo

Of the two brothers, Aureliano Segundo is the more boisterous and impulsive, much like the José Arcadios of the family.^[20] He takes his first girlfriend Petra Cotes as his mistress during his marriage to the beautiful and bitter Fernanda del Carpio.^[20] When living with Petra, his livestock propagate wildly, and he indulges in unrestrained revelry. After the long rains, his fortune dries up, and the Buendías are left almost penniless. He turns to search for a buried treasure, which nearly drives him to insanity. He dies of throat cancer at the same moment as his twin. During the confusion at the funeral, the bodies are switched, and each is buried in the other's grave (highlighting Ursula's earlier comment that they had been switched at birth). Aureliano Segundo represents Colombia's economy: gaining and losing weight according to the situation at the time.

Fernanda del Carpio

Fernanda del Carpio is the only major character (except for Rebeca and the First generation) not from Macondo.^[20] She comes from a ruined, aristocratic family that kept her isolated from the world.^[20] She was chosen as the most beautiful of 5000 girls. Fernanda is brought to Macondo to compete with Remedios for the title of Queen of the carnival after her father promises her she will be the Queen of Madagascar. After the fiasco, she marries Aureliano Segundo and soon takes the leadership of the family away from the now-frail Úrsula. She manages the Buendía affairs with an iron fist. She has three children by Aureliano Segundo: José Arcadio, Renata Remedios, a.k.a. Meme, and Amaranta Úrsula. She remains in the house after he dies, taking care of the household until her death.

Fernanda is never accepted by anyone in the Buendía household who regard her as an outsider, although none of the Buendías rebel against her inflexible conservatism. Her mental and emotional instability is revealed through her paranoia, her correspondence with the "invisible doctors", and her irrational behavior towards Aureliano, whom she tries to isolate from the whole world.

Fifth generation[link]

Renata Remedios (a.k.a. Meme)

Renata Remedios, or Meme is the second child and first daughter of Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo.^[20] While she doesn't inherit Fernanda's beauty, she does have Aureliano Segundo's love of life and natural charisma. After her mother declares that she is to do nothing but play the clavichord, she is sent to school where she receives her performance degree as well as academic recognition. While she pursues the clavichord with 'an inflexible discipline', to placate Fernanda, she also enjoys partying and exhibits the same tendency towards excess as her father.

Meme meets and falls in love with Mauricio Babilonia, but when Fernanda discovers their affair, she arranges for Mauricio to be shot, claiming that he was a chicken thief. She then takes Meme to a convent. Meme remains mute for the rest of her life, partially because of the trauma, but also as a sign of rebellion. Several months later she gives birth to a son, Aureliano, at the convent. He is sent to live with the Buendías. Aureliano arrives in a basket and Fernanda is tempted to kill the child in order to avoid shame, but instead claims he is a orphan in order to cover up her daughter's promiscuity and is forced to "tolerate him against her will for the rest of her life because at the moment of truth she lacked the courage to go through with her inner determination to drown him...". Meme dies of old age in a hospital in Kraków.

José Arcadio (II)

José Arcadio II, named after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, follows the trend of previous Arcadios.^[20] He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to become Pope. He returns from Rome without having become a priest. Eventually, he discovers buried treasure, which he wastes on lavish parties and escapades with adolescent boys. Later, he begins a tentative friendship with Aureliano Babilonia, his nephew. José Arcadio plans to set Aureliano up in a business and return to Rome, but is murdered in his bath by four of the adolescent boys who ransack his house and steal his gold.

Amaranta Úrsula

Amaranta Úrsula is the third child of Fernanda and Aureliano.^[20] She displays the same characteristics as her namesake who dies when she is only a child.^[20] She never knows that the child sent to the Buendía home is her nephew, the illegitimate son of Meme. He becomes her best friend in childhood. She returns home from Europe with an elder husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs him of her passionate affair with her nephew, Aureliano. She dies of hemorragia, after she has given birth to the last of the Buendía line.^[20]

Sixth generation[link]

Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II)

Aureliano Babilonia, or Aureliano II, is the illegitimate child of Meme. He is hidden from everyone by his grandmother, Fernanda. He is strikingly similar to his namesake, the Colonel, and has the same character patterns as well. He is taciturn, silent, and emotionally charged. He barely knows Úrsula, who dies during his childhood. He is a friend of José Arcadio Segundo, who explains to him the true story of the banana worker massacre.

While other members of the family leave and return, Aureliano stays in the Buendía home. He only ventures into the empty town after the death of Fernanda. He works to decipher the parchments of Melquíades but stops to have an affair with his childhood partner and the love of his life, Amaranta Úrsula, not knowing that she is his aunt. When both she and her child die, he is able to decipher the parchments. "...Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: 'The first in line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants'." It is assumed he dies in the great wind that destroys Macondo the moment he finishes reading Mequiades' parchments.

Seventh generation[link]

Aureliano (III)

Aureliano III is the child of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula.^[20] He is born with a pig's tail, as the eldest and long dead Úrsula had always feared would happen (the parents of the child had never heard of the omen).^[20] His mother dies after giving birth to him, and, due to his grief-stricken father's negligence, he is devoured by ants.^[20]

Others[link]

Melquíades

Melquíades is one of a band of gypsies who visit Macondo every year in March, displaying amazing items from around the world.^[20] Melquíades sells José Arcadio Buendía several new inventions including a pair of magnets and an alchemist's lab. Later, the gypsies report that Melquíades died in Singapore, but he, nonetheless, returns to live with the Buendía family.^[20] stating he could not bear the solitude of death. He stays with the Buendías and begins to write the mysterious parchments, which are eventually translated by Aureliano Babilonia. Melquíades then dies a second time from drowning in the river near Macondo and, following a grand ceremony organized by the Buendías, is the first individual buried in Macondo.

Pilar Ternera

Pilar is a local woman who sleeps with the brothers Aureliano and José Arcadio.^[20] She becomes mother of their sons, Aureliano José and Arcadio.^[20] Pilar reads the future with cards, and every so often makes an accurate, though vague, prediction.^[20] She has close ties with the Buendias throughout the whole novel, helping them with her card predictions. She dies some time after she turns 145 years old (she had eventually stopped counting),^[20] surviving until the very last days of Macondo.

The word "Ternera" in Spanish signifies veal or calf, which is fitting considering the way she is treated by Aureliano, Jose Arcadio, and Arcadio. Also, it could be a play on the word "Ternura", which in Spanish means "Tenderness". Pilar is always presented as a very loving figure, and the author often uses names in a similar fashion.

Pietro Crespi

Pietro is a very handsome and polite Italian musician who runs a music school.^[20] He installs the pianola in the Buendía house. He becomes engaged to Rebeca, but Amaranta, who also loves him, manages to delay the wedding for years. When José Arcadio and Rebeca agree to be married, Pietro begins to woo Amaranta, who is so embittered that she cruelly rejects him. Despondent over the loss of both sisters, he kills himself.

Petra Cotes

Petra is a dark-skinned woman with gold-brown eyes similar to those of a panther. She is Aureliano Segundo's mistress and the love of his life. She arrives in Macondo as a teenager with her first husband. After her husband dies, she begins a relationship with José Arcadio Segundo. When she meets Aureliano Segundo, believing him to be his brother, she begins a relationship with him as well, not knowing they are two different men. After José Arcadio decides to leave her, Aureliano Segundo gets her forgiveness and remains by her side. He continues to see her, even after his marriage. He eventually lives with her, which greatly embitters his wife, Fernanda del Carpio. When Aureliano and Petra make love, their animals reproduce at an amazing rate, but their livestock is wiped out during the four years of rain. Petra makes money by keeping the lottery alive and provides food baskets for Fernanda and her family after the death of Aureliano Segundo.

Mr. Herbert and Mr. Brown

Mr. Herbert is a gringo who showed up at the Buendía house for lunch one day. After tasting the local bananas for the first time, he arranges for a banana company to set up a plantation in Macondo. The plantation is run by the dictatorial Mr. Brown. When José Arcadio Segundo helps arrange a workers' strike on the plantation, the company traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them down in the town square. The banana company and the government completely cover up the event. José Arcadio is the only one who remembers the slaughter. The company arranges for the army to kill off any resistance, then leaves Macondo for good. That event is likely based on the Banana massacre, that took place in Santa Marta, Colombia in 1928.

Mauricio Babilonia

Mauricio is a brutally honest, generous and handsome mechanic for the banana company.^[20] He is said to be a descendant of the gypsies who visit Macondo in the early days. He has the unusual characteristic of being constantly swarmed by yellow butterflies, which follow even his lover for a time. Mauricio begins a romantic affair with Meme until Fernanda discovers them and tries to end it. When Mauricio continues to sneak into the house to see her, Fernanda has him shot, claiming he is a chicken thief. Paralyzed and bedridden, he spends the rest of his long life in solitude.

Gastón

Gastón is Amaranta Úrsula's wealthy, Belgian husband. She marries him in Europe and returns to Macondo leading him on a silk leash. Gastón is about fifteen years older than his wife. He is an aviator and an adventurer. When he moves with Amaranta Ursula to Macondo he thinks it is only a matter of time before she realizes that her European ways out of place, causing her to want to move back to Europe. However, when he realizes his wife intends to stay in Macondo, he arranges for his airplane to be shipped over so he can start an airmail service. The plane is shipped to Africa by mistake. When he travels there to claim it, Amaranta writes him of her love for Aureliano Babilonia Buendía. Gastón takes the news in stride, only asking that they ship him his velocipede.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is only a minor character in the novel but he has the distinction of bearing the same name as the author. He is the great-great-grandson of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. He and Aureliano Babilonia are close friends because they know the history of the town, which no one else believes. He leaves for Paris after winning a contest and decides to stay there, selling old newspapers and empty bottles. He is one of the few who is able to leave Macondo before the town is wiped out entirely.

Major themes[link]

The subjectivity of reality and magical realism[link]

Critics often cite certain works by García Márquez, such as A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as exemplary of magical realism, a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary. The term was coined by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925.^[21]

The novel presents a fictional story in a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characters are fabricated. However the message that García Márquez intends to deliver explains a true history. García Márquez uses his fantastic story as an expression of reality. "In One Hundred Years of Solitude myth and history overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. García Márquez's novel can furthermore be referred to as anthropology, where truth is found in language and myth. What is real and what is fiction are indistinguishable. There are three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling mythical heroes, and supernatural elements"^[19] Magical realism is inherent in the novel-achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. This magical realism strikes at one's traditional sense of naturalistic fiction. There is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo. It is a state of mind as much as, or more than, a geographical place. For example, one learns very little about its actual physical layout. Furthermore, once in it, the reader must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author presents to him or her.^[22]

García Márquez achieves a perfect blend of the real with the magical through the masterful use of tone and narration. By maintaining the same tone throughout the novel, García Márquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary. His condensation of and lackadaisical manner in describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is, thereby perfectly blending the real with the magical.^[23] Reinforcing this effect is the unastonished tone in which the book is written. This tone restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the novel. However, it also causes the reader to call into question the limits of reality.^[6] Furthermore, maintaining the same narrator throughout the novel familiarizes the reader with his voice and causes him or her to become accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel.^[24]

The fluidity of time[link]

One Hundred Years of Solitude contains several ideas concerning time. Although the story can be read as a linear progression of events, both when considering individual lives and Macondo's history, García Márquez allows room for several other interpretations of time:

• He reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family.^[25] Over six generations, all the José Arcadios possess inquisitive and rational dispositions as well as enormous physical strength. The Aurelianos, meanwhile, lean towards insularity and quietude. This repetition of traits reproduces the history of the individual characters and, ultimately, a history of the town as a succession of the same mistakes ad infinitum due to some endogenous hubris in our nature.

• The novel explores the issue of timelessness or eternity even within the framework of mortal existence. A major trope with which it accomplishes this task is the alchemist's laboratory in the Buendía family home. The laboratory was first designed by Melquíades near the start of the story and remains essentially unchanged throughout its course. It is a place where the male Buendía characters can indulge their will to solitude, whether through attempts to deconstruct the world with reason as in the case of José Arcadio Buendía, or by the endless creation and destruction of golden fish as in the case of his son Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Furthermore, a sense of inevitability prevails throughout the text. This is a feeling that regardless of what way one looks at time, its encompassing nature is the one truthful admission.

• On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that One Hundred Years of Solitude, while basically chronological and "linear" enough in its broad outlines, also shows abundant zigzags in time, both flashbacks of matters past and long leaps towards future events. One example of this is the youthful amour between Meme and Mauricio Babilonia, which is already in full swing before we are informed about the origins of the affair.^[1]

Incest[link]

A recurring theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the Buendía family's propensity toward incest. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendía, is the first of numerous Buendías to intermarry when he marries his first cousin, Úrsula. It is worth noting that this initial, incestuous act can be viewed as an "original sin", however it will not be the last one.^[1] Furthermore, the fact that "throughout the novel the family is haunted by the fear of punishment in the form of the birth of a monstrous child with a pig's tail"^[1] can be attributed to this initial, and the recurring acts of incest among the Buendías.^[1]

Solitude[link]

Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected.^[1] Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for him or her self, the Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel.^[1] This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios, who destroys the lives of four men enamored by her beauty.^[1] Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.^[1]

The selfishness of the Buendía family is eventually broken by the once superficial Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, who discover a sense of mutual solidarity and the joy of helping others in need during Macondo's economic crisis.^[1] This pair even finds love, and their pattern is repeated by Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula.^[1] Eventually, Aureliano and Amaranta decide to have a child, and the latter is convinced that it will represent a fresh start for the once-conceited Buendía family.^[1] However, the child turns out to be the perpetually feared monster with the pig's tail.

Nonetheless, the appearance of love represents a shift in Macondo, albeit one that leads to its destruction. "The emergence of love in the novel to displace the traditional egoism of the Buendías reflects the emergence of socialist values as a political force in Latin America, a force that will sweep away the Buendías and the order they represent."^[1] The ending to One Hundred Years of Solitude could be a wishful prediction by García Márquez, a well-known socialist, regarding the future of Latin America.^[1]

Interpretation[link]

Throughout the novel, García Márquez is said to have a gift for blending the everyday with the miraculous, the historical with the fabulous, and psychological realism with surreal flights of fancy. It is a revolutionary novel that provides a looking glass into the thoughts and beliefs of its author, who chose to give a literary voice to Latin America: "A Latin America which neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration."^[27]

Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, García Márquez is able to define clear themes while maintaining individual character identities, and using different narrative techniques such as third-person narrators, specific point of view narrators, and streams of consciousness. Cinematographic techniques are also employed in the novel, with the idea of the montage and the close-up, which effectively combine the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and tragic. Furthermore, political and historical realities are combined with the mythical and magical Latin American world. Lastly, through human comedy the problems of a family, a town, and a country are unveiled. This is all presented through García Márquez's unique form of narration, which causes the novel to never cease being at its most interesting point.^[28]

The characters in the novel are never defined; they are not created from a mold. Instead, they are developed and formed throughout the novel. All characters are individualized, with many characteristics that differentiate them from others.^[28] Ultimately, the novel has a rich imagination achieved by its rhythmic tone, narrative technique, and fascinating character creation, making it a thematic quarry, where the trivial and anecdotal and the historic and political are combined.^[28]

Literary significance and acclaim[link]

One Hundred Years of Solitude has received universal recognition. The novel has been awarded Italy's Chianciano Award, France's Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger, Venezuela's Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature. García Márquez also received an honorary LL.D. from Columbia University in New York City. These awards set the stage for García Márquez's 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, according to a survey of international writers commissioned by the global literary journal Wasafiri as a part of its 25th-anniversary celebration.^[29]

The superlatives from reviewers and readers alike display the resounding praise with which the novel has received. Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda called it "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes", while John Leonard in The New York Times wrote that "with a single bound, Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov."^[2]

According to Antonio Sacoto, professor at the City College of the City University of New York, One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered as one of the five key novels in Hispanic American literature (together with El Señor Presidente, Pedro Páramo, La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, and La ciudad y los perros). These novels, representative of the boom allowed Hispanic American literature to reach the quality of North American and European literature in terms of technical quality, rich themes, and linguistic innovations, among other attributes.^[28]

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, García Márquez addressed the significance of his writing and proposed its role to be more than just literary expression:

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.^[30]

Critiques[link]

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel García Márquez have both received occasional criticisms. Stylistically, Harold Bloom remarked that "My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb... There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it."^[31] Additionally, David Haberly alleges that García Márquez may have borrowed themes from several works, such as William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and Chateaubriand's Atala. This, however, is not necessarily a negative criticism, as it involves the concept of intertextuality.^[32]

Internal references[link]

In the novel's account of the civil war and subsequent peace, there are numerous mentions of the pensions not arriving for the veterans, a reference to one of Márquez's earlier works, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba. In the novel's final chapter, García Márquez references the novel Hopscotch (Spanish: Rayuela) by Julio Cortázar in the following line: "...in the room that smelled of boiled cauliflower where Rocamadour was to die" (p. 412). Rocamadour is a fictional character in Hopscotch who indeed dies in the room described. He also references two other major works by Latin American writers in the novel: The Death of Artemio Cruz (Spanish: La Muerte de Artemio Cruz) by Carlos Fuentes and Explosion in a Cathedral (Spanish: El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier.

Adaptations[link]

• Shuji Terayama's play One Hundred Years of Solitude (百年の孤独, originally performed by the Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe), as well as his film Farewell to the Ark (さらば箱舟) are loose (and not officially authorized) adaptations of the novel by García Márquez transplanted into the realm of Japanese culture and history.

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has had such a big impact on the literature world, and although this novel is the author's best selling and most translated around the world, there have been no movies produced about it. Gabriel García Márquez has never agreed to sell the rights for producing such film, even though his novel has inspired many to write and has more than enough themes to work on in the film industry.^[33]

See also[link]

• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
• List of best-selling books

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: One Hundred Years of Solitude

• Book Summary of One Hundred Years of Solitude
• One Hundred Years of Solitude Book Notes from Literapedia
• Oprah's Book Club's Guide to One Hundred Years of Solitude
• "On Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude" - a lecture by Ian Johnston
• "The Solitude of Latin America", Nobel lecture by Gabriel García Márquez, 8 December 1982
• "Memory and Prophecy, Illusion and Reality Are Mixed and Made to Look the Same" by The New York Times, March 8, 1970

v t e Works by Gabriel García Márquez Novels In Evil Hour One Hundred Years of Solitude The Autumn of the Patriarch Chronicle of a Death Foretold Love in the Time of Cholera The General in His Labyrinth Of Love and Other Demons Memories of My Melancholy Whores Short stories Leaf Storm No One Writes to the Colonel Big Mama's Funeral Innocent Eréndira Strange Pilgrims The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings Non-fiction The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor Clandestine in Chile News of a Kidnapping Living to Tell the Tale Speech The Solitude of Latin America Magic realism

Pornography is the fourth studio album by British band The Cure, originally released in 1982 and re-mastered and re-released in 2005. Once described as "Phil Spector in Hell",^[3] it is "The Cure's most gothic album".^[1][2]

Recorded with the group on the brink of collapse, it represents the conclusion of the musical phase which began with Seventeen Seconds and Faith. Robert Smith has stated that Pornography is the first of his "trilogy" of albums that best define The Cure, the second being Disintegration and the third being Bloodflowers.

Slant Magazine listed the album at #79 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980's".^[4]

Overview[link]

Often cited as The Cure's darkest album, its opening lyrical line is "It doesn't matter if we all die", ending with "I must fight this sickness, find a cure". ^[5] The line "It doesn’t matter if we all die" is considered as "The Cure’s gothic piece de resistance".^[1]

Despite the fact that very few critics in the British press gave the album a favourable review, Pornography charted well in the UK and has gained much more respect over the years, to the point that it is now considered "one of the key gothic rock albums" of all time.^[2]

Pornography is also the last Cure album to feature founding band member Lol Tolhurst as the band's drummer; he became the band's keyboardist, and this also marks the first time he played keyboards on a release by The Cure.

The album's artwork is the first in The Cure's output not to feature the logo for the group's name which was used on their previous releases.

When performed live, in this period the band started wearing their trademark big hair, smudged makeup and black clothes.

In 2002, The Cure performed Pornography live in its entirety, along with Disintegration and Bloodflowers, as part of the Trilogy concerts.

Reception[link]

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[2]
Blender	[6]
Pitchfork Media	(8.4/10) [7]
Robert Christgau	C [8]
Rolling Stone	(2004)[9]
Uncut	[10]

NME reviewer Dave Hill wrote, "This record portrays and parades its currency of exposed futility and naked fear with so few distractions or adornments, and so little sense of shame. It really piles it on." Regarding the music, Hill wrote, "The drums, guitars, voice and production style are pressed scrupulously together in a murderous unity of surging, textured mood." Hill felt that Pornography was not meant to be analysed deeply; instead it should be listened to "en bloc as a dense wash of emotional colour [. . .] And, as such, it really works".^[3] Rolling Stone gave the album one and a half stars, out of five. Reviewer J. D. Considine that The Cure's lyrics "[seem] stuck in the terminal malaise of adolescent existentialism". Considine concluded, "Backed by music that relies less on melody than thick slabs of heavily treated sound, Pornography comes off as the aural equivalent of a bad toothache".^[5] Blender.com reviewer Douglas Wolk stated: "It’s one long stare into the abyss, and horrifically intense: a slow whirlpool of bloodsucking guitars, with feel-bad hooks like “I will never be clean again.” The brilliant, winking final line: “I must fight this sickness/ Find a cure.”^[6]

2005 re-release[link]

Pornography was remastered by Chris Blair at Abbey Road Studios and reissued in the UK on 25 April 2005 (26th in the US) as part of Universal's Deluxe Edition series. The new edition featured a remastered version of the album on CD One, fixing the glitch on "Siamese Twins", while CD Two contained demo and live tracks. The bonus disc contains never-before-heard songs (in demo format, all instrumental) and an alternative version (demo or live) of each song on the album. It also contains the song "All Mine" from the Curiosity cassette and the soundtrack from the movie Airlock that aired prior to the Cure concerts in 1982.

There also exists a one-CD reissue. It was released on 5 September 2005 in the UK and 4 April 2006 in the US. The CD features the original album, but does not contain the bonus disc. It is also released in the standard jewel case, and not a box. In some countries, the "Deluxe Edition" has become a collector's item due to the phasing out of production, being replaced by the more economic one-CD version.

The Cure's logo featured on their previous releases before the 1982 release of the album was included on a sticker on the deluxe edition.

Track listing[link]

All songs by Robert Smith, Simon Gallup and Laurence Tolhurst.

Side one

1. "One Hundred Years" – 6:40
2. "A Short Term Effect" – 4:22
3. "The Hanging Garden" – 4:33
4. "Siamese Twins" – 5:29

Side two

1. "The Figurehead" – 6:15
2. "A Strange Day" – 5:04
3. "Cold" – 4:26
4. "Pornography" – 6:27

2005 "Deluxe Edition" Disc two: Rarities 1981-1982[link]

1. "Break" (group home instrumental demo) – 2:11
2. "Demise" (studio instrumental demo) – 2:09
3. "Temptation" (studio instrumental demo) – 4:00
4. "The Figurehead" (studio demo) – 6:12
5. "The Hanging Garden" (studio demo) – 5:29
6. "One Hundred Years" (studio demo) – 7:00
7. "Airlock: The Soundtrack" – 13:07
8. "Cold" (live at Hammersmith Odeon 5/82) – 3:54
9. "A Strange Day" (live at Hammersmith Odeon 5/82) – 4:05
10. "Pornography" (live at Hammersmith Odeon 5/82) – 5:55
11. "All Mine" (live at Hammersmith Odeon 5/82) – 2:54
12. "A Short Term Effect" (live in Brussels 6/82) – 4:05
13. "Siamese Twins" (live in Brussels 6/82) – 6:03
14. "Temptation Two" (AKA LGTB)(RS Studio Demo) – 3:57

Personnel[link]

• Robert Smith - guitar, keyboard (One Hundred Years, The Hanging Garden, Cold, Pornography), vocals, cello (Cold)
• Simon Gallup - bass, keyboard (A Strange Day, Cold, Pornography)
• Lol Tolhurst - drums, keyboard (One Hundred Years)

• Producer: Phil Thornalley, The Cure
• Engineer: Mike Nocito, Robert Smith
• Assistant engineer: Phil Thornalley
• Photography: Michael Kostiff
• Sleeve design: Ben Kelly

Charts[link]

References[link]

Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez, 2002.
Born	Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (1927-03-06) March 6, 1927 (age 85)
Nationality	Colombian
Education	University of Cartagena
Genres	Novels, Short stories
Literary movement	Latin American Boom Magic realism
Notable work(s)	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Autumn of the Patriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1982
Spouse(s)	Mercedes Barcha Pardo
Children	Rodrigo García Barcha, Gonzalo García Barcha
Influences Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, G. K. Chesterton, Sophocles, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf
Influenced Salman Rushdie, Louis de Bernières, Michael Chabon, T. C. Boyle, Orhan Pamuk, Steve Erickson, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jeffrey Eugenides, Syed Manzoorul Islam
Signature

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (Spanish pronunciation: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɡaɾˈsia ˈmaɾkes]; born March 6, 1927)^[1] is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the earliest remaining living recipient.¹ He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the theme of solitude.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Billboard of Gabriel García Márquez in Aracataca. It reads: "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work". —Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in the town of Aracataca, Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez.^[2][3] Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist. In January 1929, his parents moved to Sucre ^[4][5] while García Marquez stayed in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía.^[4][6] When he was nine, his grandfather died, and he moved to his parents' home in Sucre where his father owned a pharmacy.^[7][8]

When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Marquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: he (Gabriel Eligio) was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer.^[9][10] Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telegraph messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him.^[9] Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him ^[11][12] (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera^[10][13]).

Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life,^[4] his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly.^[14][15] His grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo",^[14] was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War.^[16] The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly respected.^[17] He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year García Márquez was born.^[18] The Colonel, whom García Márquez has described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality,"^[5] was also an excellent storyteller.^[19] He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store.^[20] He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs",^[21][22] reminding him that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later integrate into his novels.

García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories.^[21] In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government."^[23][24] This influenced his political views and his literary technique so that "in the same way that his writing career initially took shape in conscious opposition to the Colombian literary status quo, García Márquez's socialist and anti-imperialist views are in principled opposition to the global status quo dominated by the United States."^[25]

García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an equally influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural."^[7] The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents,^[26] all of which were studiously ignored by her husband.^[14] According to García Márquez she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality".^[5] He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, heavily influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.^[27]

Journalism[link]

García Márquez began his career as a journalist while studying law at the University of Cartagena. In 1948 and 1949 he wrote for El Universal in Cartagena. Later, from 1950 until 1952, he wrote a "whimsical" column under the name of "Septimus" for the local paper El Heraldo in Barranquilla.^[28] García Márquez noted of his time at El Heraldo, "I'd write a piece and they'd pay me three pesos for it, and maybe an editorial for another three."^[29] During this time he became an active member of the informal group of writers and journalists known as the Barranquilla Group, an association that provided great motivation and inspiration for his literary career. He worked with inspirational figures such as Ramon Vinyes, whom García Márquez depicted as an Old Catalan who owns a bookstore in One Hundred Years of Solitude.^[30] At this time, García Márquez was also introduced to the works of writers such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Faulkner's narrative techniques, historical themes and use of rural locations influenced many Latin American authors.^[31] The environment of Barranquilla gave García Márquez a world-class literary education and provided him with a unique perspective on Caribbean culture. From 1954 to 1955, García Márquez spent time in Bogotá and regularly wrote for Bogotá's El Espectador. He was a regular film critic which drove his interest in film.

[edit] The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Ending in controversy, his last domestically written editorial for El Espectador was a series of fourteen news articles^[30][32] in which he revealed the hidden story of how a Colombian Navy vessel's shipwreck "occurred because the boat contained a badly stowed cargo of contraband goods that broke loose on the deck."^[33] García Márquez compiled this story through interviews with a young sailor who survived the shipwreck.^[32] The publication of the articles resulted in public controversy, as they discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor.

In response to this controversy El Espectador sent García Márquez away to Europe to be a foreign correspondent.^[34] He wrote about his experiences for El Independiente, a newspaper which had briefly replaced El Espectador during the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla^[35] and was later shut down by Colombian authorities.^[31] García Márquez's background in journalism provided a foundational base for his writing career. Literary critic Bell-Villada noted, "Owing to his hands on experiences in journalism, García Márquez is, of all the great living authors, the one who is closest to everyday reality."^[36]

Marriage and family[link]

García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was in college, they decided to wait for her to finish before getting married. When he was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, Mercedes waited for him to return to Barranquilla. They were finally wed in 1958.^[37][38] The following year, their first son, Rodrigo García, now a television and film director, was born.^[38] In 1961, the family traveled by Greyhound bus throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City.^[39] García Márquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner.^[40] Three years later the couple's second son, Gonzalo, was born in Mexico.^[41] Gonzalo is currently a graphic designer in Mexico City.^[40]

[edit] Leaf Storm

Leaf Storm (La Hojarasca) is García Márquez's first novella and took seven years to find a publisher, finally being published in 1955.^[42] García Márquez notes that "of all that he had written (as of 1973), Leaf Storm was his favorite because he felt that it was the most sincere and spontaneous."^[43] All the events of the novel take place in one room, during a half-hour period on Wednesday September 12, 1928. It is the story of an old colonel (similar to García Márquez's own grandfather) who tries to give a proper Christian burial to an unpopular French doctor. The colonel is supported only by his daughter and grandson. The novel explores the child's first experience with death by following his stream of consciousness. As well, the book reveals the perspective of Isabel, the Colonel's daughter, which provides a feminine point of view.^[30]

[edit] One Hundred Years of Solitude

Since García Márquez was eighteen, he had wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents' house where he grew up. However, he struggled with finding an appropriate tone and put off the idea until one day the answer hit him while driving his family to Acapulco. He turned the car around and the family returned home so he could begin writing. He sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote, but writing the novel took far longer than he expected, and he wrote every day for eighteen months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and their baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord.^[44] Fortunately, when the book was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa 1970). The story chronicles several generations of the Buendía family from the time they founded the fictional South American village of Macondo, through their trials and tribulations, instances of incest, births and deaths. The history of Macondo is often generalized by critics to represent rural towns throughout Latin America or at least near García Márquez's native Aracataca.^[45][46]

This novel was widely popular and led to García Márquez's Nobel Prize as well as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972. William Kennedy has called it "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race,"^[47] and hundreds of articles and books of literary critique have been published in response to it. However, García Márquez himself does not completely understand the success of this particular book: "Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves."^[46]

Fame[link]

García Márquez signing a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Havana, Cuba.

After writing One Hundred Years of Solitude García Márquez returned to Europe, this time bringing along his family, to live in Barcelona, Catalonia for seven years.^[41] The international recognition García Márquez earned with the publication of the novel led to his ability to act as a facilitator in several negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas, including the former 19th of April Movement (M-19), and the current FARC and ELN organizations.^[48][49] The popularity of his writing also led to friendships with powerful leaders, including one with former Cuban president Fidel Castro, which has been analyzed in Gabo and Fidel: Portrait of a Friendship.^[50] It was during this time that he was punched in the face by Mario Vargas Llosa in what became one of the largest feuds in modern literature. In an interview with Claudia Dreifus in 1982 García Márquez notes his relationship with Castro is mostly based on literature: “Ours is an intellectual friendship. It may not be widely known that Fidel is a very cultured man. When we’re together, we talk a great deal about literature.”^[51] This relationship was criticized by Cuban exile writer Reinaldo Arenas, in his 1992 memoir Antes de que Anochezca (Before Night Falls).^[52]

Also due to his newfound fame and his outspoken views on U.S. imperialism he was labeled as a subversive and for many years was denied visas by U.S. immigration authorities.^[53] However, after Bill Clinton was elected U.S. president, he finally lifted the travel ban and claimed that García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was his favorite novel.^[54] There is a street in East Los Angeles, CA bearing his name.

[edit] Autumn of the Patriarch

García Márquez was inspired to write a dictator novel when he witnessed the flight of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. He shares, "it was the first time we had seen a dictator fall in Latin America."^[55] García Márquez began writing Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca) in 1968 and said it was finished in 1971; however, he continued to embellish the dictator novel until 1975 when it was published in Spain.^[56] According to García Márquez, the novel is a "poem on the solitude of power" as it follows the life of an eternal dictator known as the General. The novel is developed through a series of anecdotes related to the life of the General, which do not appear in chronological order.^[57] Although the exact location of the story is not pin-pointed in the novel, the imaginary country is situated somewhere in the Caribbean.^[58]

García Márquez gave his own explanation of the plot:

My intention was always to make a synthesis of all the Latin American dictators, but especially those from the Caribbean. Nevertheless, the personality of Juan Vicente Gomez [of Venezuela] was so strong, in addition to the fact that he exercised a special fascination over me, that undoubtedly the Patriarch has much more of him than anyone else.^[58]

After Autumn of the Patriarch was published the García Márquez's family moved from Barcelona to Mexico City^[41] and García Márquez pledged not to publish again until the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet was deposed. However, he ultimately published Chronicle of a Death Foretold while Pinochet was still in power as he "could not remain silent in the face of injustice and repression."^[59]

[edit] Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) recreates a murder that took place in Sucre, Colombia in 1951. The character named Santiago Nasar is based on a good friend from García Márquez's childhood, Cayetano Gentile Chimento.^[60] Pelayo classifies this novel as a combination of journalism, realism and detective story.^[61]

The plot of the novel revolves around Santiago Nasar's murder. The narrator acts as a detective, uncovering the events of the murder second by second.^[62] Literary critic Ruben Pelayo notes that the story "unfolds in an inverted fashion. Instead of moving forward... the plot moves backwards."^[63] In the first chapter, the narrator tells the reader exactly who killed Santiago Nasar and the rest of the book is left to unfold why.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published in 1981, the year before García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.^[60] The novel was also adapted into a film by Italian director Francesco Rosi in 1987.^[62]

[edit] Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) was first published in 1985. It is considered a non-traditional love story as "lovers find love in their 'golden years'- in their seventies, when death is all around them".^[64]

Love in the Time of Cholera is based on the stories of two couples. The young love of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza is based on the love affair of García Márquez's parents.^[65] However, as García Márquez explains in an interview: “The only difference is [my parents] married. And as soon as they were married, they were no longer interesting as literary figures.”^[65] The love of old people is based on a newspaper story about the death of two Americans, who were almost 80 years old, who met every year in Acapulco. They were out in a boat one day and were murdered by the boatman with his oars. García Márquez notes, “Through their death, the story of their secret romance became known. I was fascinated by them. They were each married to other people.”^[66]

Illness[link]

In 1999, García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer.^[54] Chemotherapy provided by a hospital in Los Angeles proved to be successful, and the illness went into remission.^[54][67] This event prompted García Márquez to begin writing his memoirs: "I reduced relations with my friends to a minimum, disconnected the telephone, canceled the trips and all sorts of current and future plans", he told El Tiempo, the Colombian newspaper, "...and locked myself in to write every day without interruption."^[67] In 2002, three years later, he published Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir para Contarla), the first volume in a trilogy of memoirs.^[67]

In 2000, his impending death was incorrectly reported by Peruvian daily newspaper La República. The next day other newspapers republished his alleged farewell poem, "La Marioneta" but shortly afterwards García Márquez denied being the author of the poem, which was determined to be the work of a Mexican ventriloquist.^[68][69]

Recent works[link]

In 2002, García Márquez published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. Edith Grossman's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale, was published in November 2003.^[70] As of March 2008 his most recent novel is Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Memoria de mis putas tristes), a love story that follows the romance of a 90-year-old man and a pubescent concubine, that was published in October 2004. This book caused controversy in Iran, where it was banned after the initial 5,000 copies were printed and sold.^[71][72]

In May 2008, despite the fact that García Márquez had earlier declared that he "had finished with writing", it was announced that the author was now finishing a new novel, "a novel of love" that had yet to be given a title, to be published by the end of the year.^[73] However, in April 2009 his agent, Carmen Balcells, told the Chilean newspaper La Tercera that García Márquez was unlikely to write again.^[74] Since then, in October 2010, that has been recanted by Random House Mondadori editor Cristobal Pera who revealed that García Márquez was completing a new novel called or We'll Meet in August (En agosto nos vemos) that is now awaiting publication.^[75]

Film[link]

García Márquez with the Colombian Culture Minister Paula Moreno (left) at the Guadalajara International Film Festival, in Guadalajara, Mexico, on March, 2009

Critics often describe the language that García Márquez's imagination produces as visual or graphic,^[76] and he himself explains each of his stories is inspired by "a visual image,"^[77] so it comes as no surprise that he has a long and involved history with film. He is a film critic, he founded and served as executive director of the Film Institute in Havana,^[76] was the Head of the Latin American Film Foundation, and has written several screenplays.^[31] For his first script he worked with Carlos Fuentes on Juan Rulfo's El gallo de oro.^[76] His other screenplays include the films Tiempo de morir (1966) and Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988), as well as the television series Amores difíciles (1991).^[76][78]

García Márquez also originally wrote his Eréndira as a third screenplay. However, this version was lost and replaced by the novella. Nonetheless, he worked on rewriting the script in collaboration with Ruy Guerra and the film was released in Mexico in 1983.^[79]

Several of his stories have inspired other writers and directors. In 1987, the Italian director Francesco Rosi directed the movie Cronaca di una morte annunciata based on Chronicle of a Death Foretold.^[80] Several film adaptations have been made in Mexico, including Miguel Littin's La Viuda de Montiel (1979), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's Maria de mi corazón (1979),^[81] and Arturo Ripstein's El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1998).^[82]

British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) filmed Love in the Time of Cholera in Cartagena, Colombia, with the screenplay written by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). The film was released in the U.S. on November 16, 2007.^[83]

His novel Of Love and Other Demons has been adapted and directed by a Costa Rican filmmaker, Hilda Hidalgo, who is a graduate of the Film Institute at Havana where García Márquez frequently imparts screenplay workshops. Hidalgo's film was released in April 2010.

Style[link]

"Gabo" wearing a "sombrero vueltiao" hat, typical of the Colombian Caribbean region. Most of the stories by García Márquez revolve around the idiosyncrasy of this region.

While there are certain aspects readers can almost always expect in García Márquez's writing, like instances of humour, he does not stick to any clear and predetermined style template. In an interview with Marlise Simons, García Márquez noted:

In every book I try to make a different path [...]. One doesn't choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that and they see things I hadn't seen. I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean.^[84]

García Márquez is also noted for leaving out seemingly important details and events so the reader is forced into a more participatory role in the story development. For example, in No One Writes to the Colonel, the main characters are not given names. This practice is influenced by Greek tragedies, such as Antigone and Oedipus Rex, in which important events occur off-stage and are left to the audience's imagination.^[85]

Realism and Magical Realism[link]

Reality is an important theme in all of García Márquez's works. He has said of his early works (with the exception of Leaf Storm), "Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Big Mama's Funeral all reflect the reality of life in Colombia and this theme determines the rational structure of the books. I don't regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality."^[86]

In his other works he has experimented more with less traditional approaches to reality, so that "the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression".^[87] A commonly cited example is the physical and spiritual ascending into heaven of a character while she is hanging the laundry out to dry in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The style of these works fits in the "marvellous realm" described by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and has been labeled as magical realism.^[88] Literary critic Michael Bell proposes an alternative understanding for García Márquez's style, as the category magic realism is criticized for being dichotimizing and exoticizing, "what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimentally the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed."^[89] García Márquez and his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza discuss his work in a similar way, "'The way you treat reality in your books...has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it...' 'This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.'"^[90]

Motifs[link]

Solitude[link]

The theme of solitude runs through much of García Márquez's works. As Pelayo notes, "Love in the Time of Cholera, like all of Gabriel García Márquez's work, explores the solitude of the individual and of humankind...portrayed through the solitude of love and of being in love".^[91]

In response to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's question, "If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood perhaps?" García Márquez replied, "I think it's a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously."^[92]

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Solitude of Latin America", he relates this theme of solitude to the Latin American experience, "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."^[93]

Macondo[link]

Another important theme in many of García Márquez's work is the setting of the village he calls Macondo. He uses his home town of Aracataca, Colombia as a cultural, historical and geographical reference to create this imaginary town, but the representation of the village is not limited to this specific area. García Márquez shares, "Macondo is not so much a place as a state of mind, which allows you to see what you want, and how you want to see it."^[94] Even when his stories do not take place in Macondo, there is often still a consistent lack of specificity to the location. So while they are often set with "a Caribbean coastline and an Andean hinterland... [the settings are] otherwise unspecified, in accordance with García Márquez's evident attempt to capture a more general regional myth rather than give a specific political analysis."^[95] "This fictional town has become well known in the literary world. As Stavans notes of Macondo, "its geography and inhabitants constantly invoked by teachers, politicians, and tourdepictsist agents..." makes it "...hard to believe it is a sheer fabrication."^[96] In Leaf Storm García Márquez depicts the realities of the Banana Boom in Macondo, which include a period of great wealth during the presence of the US companies and a period of depression upon the departure of the American banana companies.^[97] As well, Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in Macondo and tells the complete history of the fictional town from its founding to its doom.^[98]

In his autobiography, García Márquez explains his fascination with the word and concept Macondo. He describes a trip he made with his mother back to Aracataca as a young man:

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant...I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the Ceiba.^[99]

La violencia[link]

In several of García Márquez's works, including No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Leaf Storm, he references la violencia (the violence), "a brutal civil war between conservatives and liberals that lasted into the 1960s, causing the deaths of several hundred thousand Colombians."^[32][100] Throughout all of his novels there are subtle references to la violencia, for example, characters living under various unjust situations like curfew, press censorship, and underground newspapers.^[101] In Evil Hour, while not one of García Márquez's most famous novels, is notable for its portrayal of la violencia with its "fragmented portrayal of social disintegration provoked by la violencia".^[102] However, although García Márquez does portray the corrupt nature and the injustices of times like la violencia, he refuses to use his work as a platform for political propaganda. "For him, the duty of the revolutionary writer is to write well, and the ideal novel is one that moves its reader by its political and social content, and, at the same time, by its power to penetrate reality and expose its other side.^[101]

Legacy[link]

García Márquez is an important part of the Latin American Boom of literature.^[104] His work has challenged critics of Colombian literature to step out of the conservative criticism that had been dominant before the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In a review of literary criticism Robert Sims notes,

García Márquez continues to cast a lengthy shadow in Colombia, Latin America, and the United States. Critical works on the 1982 Nobel laureate have reached industrial proportion and show no signs of abating. Moreover, García Márquez has galvanized Colombian literature in an unprecedented way by giving a tremendous impetus to Colombian literature. Indeed, he has become a touchstone for literature and criticism throughout the Americas as his work has created a certain attraction-repulsion among critics and writers while readers continue to devour new publications. No one can deny that García Márquez has helped rejuvenate, reformulate, and recontextualize literature and criticism in Colombia and the rest of Latin America.^[105]

Nobel Prize[link]