One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude

cover to a recent edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author	Gabriel García Márquez
Translator	Gregory Rabassa
Country	Colombia
Language	Spanish
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Harper and Row (USA) & Jonathan Cape (UK)
Publication date	1967 (translation 25 June 1970)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	432 p. (UK hardback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0224618539 (UK hardback edition)

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad) is a novel by Gabriel García Márquez which was first published in Spanish in 1967 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana), with an English translation by Gregory Rabassa released in 1970 (New York: Harper and Row). The book is considered García Márquez's masterpiece, metaphorically encompassing the history of Colombia. The novel spans one hundred years of the life of a small Colombian town called Macondo, which García Márquez acknowledges in his autobiography Living to Tell the Tale was based on the towns where he spent his childhood.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler All of the events of One Hundred Years of Solitude take place in the fictional Colombian village of Macondo. The town is founded by José Arcadio Buendía, a strong-willed and impulsive leader who becomes deeply interested in the mysteries of the universe when a band of gypsies visits Macondo, led by the recurring Melquíades. As the town grows, the fledgling government of the country takes an interest in Macondo's affairs, but they are held back by José Arcadio Buendía.

Civil war breaks out in the land, and Macondo soon takes a role in the war, sending a militia led by Colonel Aureliano Buendía, José Arcadio Buendía's son, to fight against the conservative regime. While the colonel is gone, José Arcadio Buendia goes insane and must be tied to a tree. Arcadio, his illegitimate grandchild, takes leadership of the town but soon becomes a brutal dictator. The Conservatives capture the town, and Arcadio is shot by a firing squad.

The wars continue, with Colonel Aureliano narrowly avoiding death multiple times, until, weary of the meaningless fighting, he arranges a peace treaty that will last until the end of the novel. After the treaty is signed, Aureliano shoots himself in the chest, but survives. The town develops into a sprawling center of activity as foreigners arrive by the thousands. The foreigners begin a banana plantation near Macondo. The town prospers until a strike arises at the banana plantation. The national army is called in, and the protesting workers are gunned down and thrown into the ocean. At this time, Úrsula, the impossibly ancient widow of José Arcadio Buendía, remarks that "it was as if time was going in a circle".

After the banana worker massacre, the town is saturated by heavy rains that last for almost five years. Úrsula says that she is waiting for the rains to stop so that she can die at last. The last member of the Buendía line, named Aureliano Babilonia (originally referred to as Aureliano Buendía, before he discovers through Melquíades' parchments that Babilonia is his paternal surname), is born at this time. When the rains stop, Úrsula dies at last, and Macondo is left desolated.

Aureliano Babilonia is finally left in solitude at the crumbling Buendía house, where he studies the parchments of Melquíades, who has appeared as a ghost to him. He gives up on this task to have a love affair with his aunt, though he is unsure whether they are related. When she dies in childbirth and his son (who is born with a pig's tail) is eaten by ants, Aureliano is finally able to decipher the parchments. The house, and the town, disintegrate into a whirlwind as he translates the parchments, on which is contained the entire history of the Buendía family, as predicted by Melquíades. As he finishes translating, the entire town is obliterated from the world.

Characters in "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

First Generation

José Arcadio Buendía

The patriarch of the Buendía clan, José Arcadio Buendía is strong-willed, immovable by others (both physically and mentally), but has a deep interest in philosophical mysteries. Buendía is responsible for leading Macondo through its early stages, but disappears from the storyline when he goes insane searching for the Philosopher's stone and believes that time has stopped at a particular Monday. Eventually he loses the ability to communicate with his family in Spanish, speaking instead in Latin. He is tied to a chestnut tree, but is released by Úrsula a short time before his death.

Úrsula Iguarán

José Arcadio Buendía's wife is the matriarch of the family, as well as the member who lives through the most generations. Úrsula runs the family with a strong will and firm hand through several portions of the book, and dies at the age of 120+, having slowly shrunken to the size of a fetus.

Second Generation

José Arcadio

José Arcadio Buendía's firstborn son, José Arcadio seems to have inherited his father's headstrong, impulsive mannerisms. When the gypsies come to Macondo, a gypsy woman who sees José Arcadio's naked body exclaims that he has the biggest male genitalia she has ever seen. He has an affair with a woman named Pilar Ternera, but leaves her after getting her pregnant. He eventually leaves the family to chase a gypsy girl and surprisingly returns many years later as a grown man, claiming that he'd sailed the seas of the world. He marries Rebeca and lives away from the family and dies from a mysterious gunshot wound, days after saving his brother from execution.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía

José Arcadio Buendía's second son, Aureliano, appeared to have inherited his father's pensive, philosophical nature. He studies metallurgy, and joins the Liberal party when war breaks out. He fights the Colombian government in 32 civil wars, and avoids death multiple times. Having lost all interest in the war, he signs a peace treaty and returns home. In his old age, he loses all capacity for emotion or memory, spending each day making and unmaking tiny golden fish. He dies while urinating on the tree his father had been tied to for so many years.

Remedios Moscote

Remedios was the youngest daughter of the town's Conservative administrator, Don Apolinar Moscote. The future Colonel Aureliano falls in love with her, despite her extreme youth. She is so young, in fact, that the wedding must be delayed until she reaches puberty. To everyone's surprise she makes a wonderful wife, but dies due to pregnancy complications shortly after the marriage.

Amaranta

The third child of José Arcadio Buendía, Amaranta grows up a companion of Rebeca; her feelings toward Rebeca, however, turn sour over Pietro Crespi, whom both sisters intensely desire in their teenage years. When Rebeca marries José Arcadio instead, Amaranta rejects any man who seeks her out, including Pietro Crespi, who courts her after Rebeca leaves him. She has a brief love interest towards her nephew, Aureliano José, and in a final attempt to ease her solitude, touches her great-great nephew José Arcadio (son of Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo) in an inappropriate manner when he is three years old. Death in the form of an old woman comes to Amaranta and commands her to begin weaving a funeral shroud, and upon the shroud's completion, Amaranta dies that night, an embittered virgin.

Rebeca

Rebeca is an orphan. When she arrived in Macondo, she brought with her her parents' bones and an insomnia plague. Rebeca becomes engaged to Pietro Crespi, Amaranta's future fiancé, but leaves him to marry the returned José Arcadio. Disinherited by Úrsula for marrying in a period of mourning for Aureliano's wife Remedios and for the "inconceivable lack of respect" their pseudo-incestuous marriage directed at Úrsula, the pair move to another home. When her husband dies, Rebeca bars the door and lives in solitude for the rest of her life.

Third Generation

Arcadio

Arcadio is José Arcadio's illegitimate son by Pilar Ternera. He is a schoolteacher, but assumes leadership of Macondo when Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves, upon Aureliano's request. He becomes a tyrannical dictator and uses his schoolchildren as his personal army, and Macondo becomes subject to his whims. He attempts to uproot the church, persecute Conservatives living in the town (like Don Apolinar Moscote), and patrols the town with his troops, but when he tried to give Don Apolinar a whipping for a snide remark, Ursula whips him, and takes control of the town. Upon receiving news that the Conservative forces had made a comeback, Arcadio resolves to fight the Conservatives that fall upon the town, with the resources they have, despite gross disadvantages. The Liberal forces in Macondo fall, and Arcadio is shot shortly after the defeat by the Conservative firing squad.

Aureliano José

Aureliano José is the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, also by Pilar Ternera. He joins his father in several wars, but returns to Macondo because he is in love with his aunt, Amaranta. The two engage in sexual activities, but Amaranta rejects him once she realizes the full extent of her actions. Aureliano José is shot by a Conservative captain of the guard midway through the wars, for running away from a squad of police.

Santa Sofía de la Piedad

Santa Sofía is the wife of Arcadio. Mother of Remedios the Beauty, José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. She plays a minor role in the novel, staying in the background as a maid in the Buendía home. She leaves unexpectedly during the final years of Macondo's existence.

17 Aurelianos

During his 32 civil war campaigns, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has 17 sons by 17 different women, each of whom he stays with for only one night. It is explained that, traditionally, young women were sent to sleep with soldiers, and the Buendía household is visited by 17 different mothers wanting Úrsula to baptize their son. Úrsula baptizes them all with the name Aureliano and the same last name as the mother. Later on the sons return to the Buendía house, and eventually all are assassinated by the government, identified by the mysteriously permanent Ash Wednesday cross on their foreheads.

Fourth Generation

Remedios the Beauty

Remedios is Arcadio and Santa Sofía's first child, and she inherits her mother's beauty. It is said she's the most beautiful woman in the world, thus causing the deaths of several men who love her. She appears to most of the town naively innocent throughout her life. However, Colonel Aureliano Buendía believes she has inherited great lucidity. "It is as if she's gone to war". This ability to penetrate flamboyant social construct results in Remedios leading a simple life that would be considered idiosyncratic. She rejects clothing and beauty, sewing a cassock and shaving her hair. Ironically, it is her touch with base human instinct that perpetuates her as an object of lust for more men. Too beautiful and, arguably, too wise for the world, Remedios ascends into the sky one morning as Fernanda looks on.

José Arcadio Segundo

José Arcadio Segundo is the twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, the children of Arcadio and Santa Sofía. 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 one of the two survivors of the massacre (the other was a child he carried on his shoulders during the proclamation of the Decree that started the massacre). Afterward, he spends the rest of his days studying the parchments, and tutoring the young Aureliano. He dies at the exact instant that his twin does.

Aureliano Segundo

Of the two brothers, Aureliano Segundo is the more boisterous and impulsive, much like the José Arcadios of the family. He takes Petra Cotes as his mistress, even during his marriage to Fernanda del Carpio. 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, eventually almost going insane. He wastes away, and dies 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.

Fernanda del Carpio

Fernanda is the only major character (except for perhaps Rebeca) that does not originate in Macondo. She 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. She marries Aureliano Segundo. Soon, Fernanda takes leadership of the family away from the frail Úrsula and manages Buendía affairs with an iron fist. She has three children by Aureliano, and remains in the house after he dies. Fernanda is never accepted by anyone in the Buendía household, and though the Buendías do nothing to rebel against her inflexible conservatism, she is generally regarded by the family as an outsider, and a "stuck up highlander". In the course of the novel, Fernanda's mental instability is revealed through her paranoia, her correspondence with the 'invisible doctors', and her irrational behavior towards Aureliano.

Fifth Generation

Renata Remedios (Meme)

Meme is the first child of Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo. After Don Fernando del Carpio declares that she play the clavichord and do nothing else, she is sent to school and receives her performance degree. 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. She meets and falls in love with Mauricio Babilonia, a mechanic working for the banana plantation, but when Fernanda finds out that they were having sexual relations, she arranges for Mauricio Babilonia to be shot by claiming that he was a chicken thief, and takes Meme to a convent. Meme remains mute for the rest of her life, not because of the trauma, but as a sign of rebellion and determination. Several months later we know she was pregnant because she gives birth to a son, Aureliano, at the convent. She dies of old age in an unknown hospital in Krakow.

José Arcadio (II)

José Arcadio, named after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, follows the trend of the previous Arcadios. He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to become the Pope. Returning home from Rome (without having become a priest) after the death of his mother, he discovers a buried treasure and begins to waste it on lavish parties. Later, he begins a tentative friendship with Aureliano Babilonia. José Arcadio plans to set Aureliano up in a business and return to Rome, but is murdered in his pool by four schoolchildren who steal his gold.

Amaranta Úrsula

Amaranta Úrsula is the third child of Fernanda and Aureliano. She displays the same characteristics as her namesake, Úrsula, who dies when she is only a child. She never knows that the child sent to the Buendía home is her nephew, the illegitimate son of Meme. She returns home from Europe with a husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs him of her affair with Aureliano, her nephew. She dies in childbirth, leaving Aureliano the last member of the family.

Sixth Generation

Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II)

Aureliano is the illegitimate child of Meme. He is sent to the house and hidden from everyone by his grandmother, Fernanda. He is strikingly similar of his namesake, the Colonel, and has the same character patterns as well. 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 at the house. 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 Amaranta Úrsula. When both she, and her child, die, he is able to decipher the parchments, alone in the house. "... 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." He is assumed to have died along with the rest of Macondo, now a nearly deserted town.

Seventh Generation

Aureliano (III)

The illegitimate child of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula. The child was born with a pig's tail, as the eldest Úrsula had always feared would happen. The mother died while giving birth to her son, and due to the negligence of his father, the son is devoured by ants.

Others

Melquíades

Melquíades is one of a troop of gypsies who would visit Macondo every year in March, displaying amazing items from around the world (note: a second, different gypsie troop begins visiting the town bringing wonders such as magic carpets and ice along with the snake man that prompts Jose Arcadio's disappearance). 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, saying that death bored him. He begins to write the mysterious parchments that Aureliano Babilonia eventually translates, before dying a second time.

After Melquiades' death, Marquez makes reference to one of his earlier short stories, Big Mama's Funeral.

Pilar Ternera

Pilar is a local woman who sleeps with the brothers Aureliano and José Arcadio. She becomes mother of their sons, Aureliano José and Arcadio. Pilar reads the future with cards, and every so often makes an accurate, though vague, prediction. She eventually opens a brothel, and dies many years past one hundred.

Pietro Crespi

Pietro is an Italian musician who runs a music school and 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 claims Rebeca for his own wife, Pietro begins to woo Amaranta, who cruelly rejects him. Despondent over the loss of both sisters, he kills himself.

Petra Cotes

Petra is Aureliano Segundo's mistress. He continues to see her, even after his marriage, and eventually lives with her. This 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 five years of rain. Petra makes money by running a lottery, 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 eating bananas for the first time, he arranges for a banana company to set up a plantation in Macondo. The banana company is run by the dictatorial Mr. Brown. Meme befriends his daughter, Patricia. When José Arcadio Segundo helps arrange a strike, the company traps the strikers and machine guns them in the town square, stacking the corpses on a secret train and dumping them into the sea. 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, but not before causing it to rain for almost five years.

Mauricio Babilonia

Mauricio is a mechanic for the banana company. He has the unusual characteristic of being constantly swarmed by yellow butterflies. 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 as a chicken thief. He spends the rest of his life as an invalid, ostracized as a thief. Meme becomes pregnant with his son, Aureliano.

Gastón

Gastón is Amaranta Úrsula's 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 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. Gastón takes the news in stride, only asking that they ship him his velocipede.

Main themes

The subjectivity of reality

Many readers and critics cite García Márquez as a pioneer of magical realism, a style of writing that is analogous to surrealism in pictorial and plastic work. In magical realism, events that seem impossible – such as levitation – are commonplace, and things are not as they first appear. Magical realism is common among Latin American authors, though disparaged as self-indulgence by some critics. It should be noted that García Márquez himself eschewed the label "magical realism."

The fluidity of time

One Hundred Years of Solitude contains several ideas of time. First, the story can be read simply as a linear progression of events, both when considering the individual lives or Macondo's history. All the characters eventually die within the course of the novel, after all, and the town is obliterated by the final page. But García Márquez obviously intends for at least two other understandings of time. For one, he reifies the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon, through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. Over six generations all the José Arcadios possess inquisitive and rational dispositions as well as physical strength; the Aurelianos, meanwhile, tend 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. Finally, 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, first designed by Melquíades near the start of the story and which remains essentially unchanged throughout its course as 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 like his son Colonel Aureliano Buendía, among a number of other means. A sense of inevitability prevails throughout the text, a feeling that regardless of what way one looks at time, its encompassing nature is the one truthful admission.

Awards and nominations

In addition to García Márquez's Nobel Prize for Literature for his oeuvre as a whole, One Hundred Years of Solitude was awarded Venezuela's prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize for literature in 1972.

Trivia

• The song Roderigo by Seven Mary Three was inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• The song Pietro Crespi by Owen was inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• The song Banana Co. by Radiohead was inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• This book was said by President Clinton to be his favorite.

Release details

Editions in print

• ISBN 843760494X Spanish original; paperback
• ISBN 0060740450 English translation; North American paperback
• ISBN 0140278761 English translation; European paperback

External links

• Article from the Spanish language Wikipedia
• Sparknotes summary
• Google Print
• Gabriel García Márquez – Nobel Lecture