A hundred years of solitude

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The author Gabriel García Márquez (2002)
The author Gabriel García Márquez

One hundred years of solitude ( Spanish original title: Cien años de soledad ) is a novel by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) from 1967.

meaning

Since it was first published on June 5, 1967 in Buenos Aires , over 30 million copies have been sold worldwide. The novel was translated into 37 languages ​​by 2017 and is considered one of the most important works of magical realism and Latin American literature in general. The author himself claimed that he by no means considered it his best work, but the long history of its origins, as it is u. a. in the García-Márquez-biography of Juri Paporow (see under Sources ) , suggests that the author considered it his magnum opus . First editions of the work are now counted among the cultural heritage of Colombia .

action

The novel Hundred Years of Solitude accompanies six generations of the Buendía family and a hundred years of real life in the fictional world of Macondo , which, however, refers to the author's Colombian homeland. At first, the chronological sequence is hardly recognizable. The extensively applied style means the supply and return handles ( Pro - and analepsis ) can be at a first reading of the impression that it is a jumble of episodes from the life of the protagonists here. This impression is supplemented by numerous homonymies of the characters. In fact, the order of the individual chapters follows the chronology of the narrated events - with the exception of the opening chapter, which is a single major anticipation. A number of literary scholars, including Mechthild Strausfeld , come to the conclusion that the story of Macondo, and thus the plot of the novel, can be roughly divided into four periods:

The Buendías move out and Macondos are founded

The ancestor of the Buendías, since he has committed murder and is fleeing from the ghost of the man he has murdered, moves with his wife and several other families through the jungle in search of a suitable place to found a village. They eventually found Macondo. Soon after, a group of gypsies appears . a. Melchíades, another main character in the novel.

Appearance of the magistrate and course of the civil wars

The appearance of a corregidor 'land judge' seals Macondo's integration into the system of state administration and violence, from which its remote topography was supposed to protect the residents. Since this village is now also part of the republic, the civil war between conservatives and liberals also plays a role for the residents of Macondo. The Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the main character of the novel, is doing here particularly prominent.

The banana factory

After the civil war, a North American banana factory becomes the village's main employer. Their dealings with the workers are marked by harshness and brutality. So it happens u. a. to a hushed up massacre at the train station, in which all the striking workers present are killed.

The slow decline and total destruction of the village

In the last chapters Macondo lies in a deep agony in which everything falls into disrepair or the jungle slowly reclaims the territory that was once wrested from it by humans, without it particularly disturbing or even astonishing the inhabitants. The story culminates in a mystical and unexpected ending: Aureliano Babilonia, the last surviving descendant of José Arcadio Buendías, deciphers the encrypted writings of Melchíades, which turn out to be a chronicle and prophecy of the history of Macondo; it ends with the destruction of the village, in which Aureliano Babilonia is also killed - just as he reads about it in Melchíades' prophecy.

family tree

Interpretative approach

The novel contains many references to the Catholic faith and the Bible , not least in the arc that it spans from the founding of the place ( Genesis ) to its destruction ( Apocalypse ). In addition, the plot of the book is considered by many literary scholars to be an allegory of the history of Latin America . Strausfeld divides this story into four epochs, which she assigns to the four sections of the novel listed above:

  1. Discovery, Conquest, Colonial Era (1492-1830)
  2. Republic: beginning of the civil wars (1830–1902)
  3. Beginning of imperialism: bananas etc. (1899–1930)
  4. Topicality - Neo-imperialism (1930 – present)

Film adaptations

Despite the worldwide success, there is still no film adaptation of Hundred Years of Solitude . The reason for this lies in García Márquez's negative attitude towards a possible film adaptation. There is a Mexican film adaptation of his story El coronel no tiene quien le escriba 'The Colonel Has Nobody Who Writes to Him' , with the German title No Post for the Colonel (1999, director: Arturo Ripstein ), whose plot is considered by many philologists as at least interwoven with that of a hundred years of loneliness , but García Márquez 'defended himself against a film adaptation of the novel.

The film Lebewohl Arche (1984) by Japanese director Shūji Terayama , who is also his last work, is loosely based on the book and relocates elements of the plot to Japan, but is not authorized as a film adaptation. Before that he had already realized a play with the Japanese title of the book ( 百年 の 孤独 Hyaku-nen no kodoku ).

On March 6, 2019, Netflix announced that it had acquired the rights to the film from the Nobel Laureate's family.

expenditure

  • Gabriel García Marquez: Cien años de soledad . Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires 1967 (original edition)
  • Gabriel García Márquez: A Hundred Years of Solitude, novel, translated from Spanish by Curt Meyer-Clason , with an afterword by Carlos Cerda. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar, 1980
  • Gabriel García Márquez: A Hundred Years of Solitude , novel, translated from Spanish by Curt Meyer-Clason. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3-596-16250-5
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Cien años de soledad. Edición conmemorativa . Real Academia Española, Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. 2007 (distributed by the publishers that publish GG Márquez in Latin America and Spain: Norma, Diana, Sudamericana, Mondadori). This edition is the basis for the new translation by Dagmar Ploetz.
  • Gabriel García Márquez: A Hundred Years of Solitude , novel, new translation from Spanish by Dagmar Ploetz. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-462-31707-7

See also

  • Francisco Rada , whose person Gabriel García Márquez inspired the figure of the troubadour "Francisco El Hombre".

swell

  • Gabriel García Marquez: Cien años de soledad . Sudamericana, Buenos Aires 1970
  • Heide Lutosch: end of the family - end of story. On the family novel by Thomas Mann , Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Michel Houellebecq . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-89528-624-7 (Dissertation University of Hannover 2006, 206 pages, 21 cm, 300 g).
  • Юрий Папоров (Yuri Paporow): Габриель Гарсиа Маркес. Путь к славе ( Gabriel García Márquez. Put 'k slawe , German: Gabriel García Márquez. The way to fame ). Азбука-классика, Санкт-Петербург (Azbuka-Klassika, Saint Petersburg) 2003, ISBN 5-352-00279-9 (Russian).
  • Mechthild Strausfeld: Aspects of the Latin American novel and a model: "Hundred Years of Solitude" (Gabriel García Márquez) (= Hispanic Studies , Volume 3), Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Bern 1976, ISBN 3-261-01774-0 .
  • Alfonso de Toro: Los laberintos del tiempo. Temporalidad y narración como estrategia textual y lectoral en la novela contemporánea (G. García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa , Juan Rulfo , Alain Robbe-Grillet ) (= Teoría y crítica de la cultura y literatura , Volume 3). Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-89354-203-5 .
  • Dagmar Ploetz: Gabriel García Márquez. Life and work . KiWi-Taschenbuch, 2010, ISBN 978-3-462-04161-3 .

literature

  • Volker Roloff: The Carnivalization of the Apocalypse. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 'A Hundred Years of Solitude' (1967). In Gunter Grimm, Werner Faulstich, Peter Kuon (eds.): Apocalypse: Doomsday visions in the literature of the 20th century. Materials. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 978-3-518-38567-8 , pp. 68-87.
  • Karl Günter Simon , Gilles Peress (photos): Colombia. Everyone wants to go to Eldorado . In: Geo . 12/1977, pages 8-42. Gruner + Jahr, Hamburg (The report describes the context of the novel by Gabriel García Márquez: Hundred Years of Solitude ).
  • Michael Wood: Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, ISBN 978-0-521-31692-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alfonso de Toro lists the anas and proleps in detail in Los laberintos del tiempo .
  2. ↑ "One Hundred Years of Solitude" becomes a Netflix series. Retrieved March 6, 2019 .