One Hundred Years of Solitude

Introduction

After the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, Gabriel García Márquez enjoyed increasing international appeal in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. The initial reaction to the novel's Spanish edition, which was first issued in Buenos Aires, was overwhelming: New editions were published at the amazing rate of one per week as the public and critics alike applauded the Colombian masterpiece. Reactions around the world were similar as translations were published: In France, the novel was proclaimed the best foreign book of 1969; in Italy, it was awarded the Chianchiano Prize (1969); and in the United States, it was named one of the twelve best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review (1970). One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into more than twenty-seven languages (Bell-Villada, p.23).

The worldwide appeal of García Márquez's masterpiece is widely acknowledged to have been the single most important factor in the extraordinary growth of interest in the Latin American novel. No novelist of the post-World War II era has had an international influence greater than that of García Márquez; his use of Magical Realism gave rise to one of the dominant trends in world fiction in the 1970's and the 1980's. The winner of numerous literary honors, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1972, García Márquez was awarded the world's highest literary accolade, the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1982 (McMurray, p.12).

Discussion

Story

Standing before a firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembers the day that his father, José Arcadio Buendía, had taken him to see ice for the first time. This had taken place in the early years of Macondo, the town that the elder Buendía, his wife Úrsula, and others had founded after José Arcadio and Úrsula had sought to escape the ghost of a man who José Arcadio had killed. The dead man had accused José Arcadio of impotence, when the real reason that the Buendías had avoided sex for so long after marriage was that they were afraid of producing a child with a pig's tail, something that had already happened between their two “inbred” families.

Soon after the founding of Macondo, gypsies begin to visit the town with incredible inventions, the wonder of which ignites the scientific curiosity of José Arcadio. Through these visits the Buendías meet Melquíades, a wise and magical gypsy and author of a mysterious manuscript. On one particular visit by the gypsies, right after the town learns of Melquíades's death in a far-off land, José Arcadio Buendía and his sons are introduced to ice, which the elder Buendía calls “the great invention of our time” (Bloom, p.42).

José Arcadio and Úrsula Buendía have two sons, Aureliano and José Arcadio, and two daughters, Amaranta and Rebeca, the latter of whom they had adopted after she had shown up on their doorstep, orphaned and with her parents' bones in a canvas sack. The two sons both father illegitimate children by Pilar Ternera, and the older son, José Arcadio, soon runs ...