One Hundred Years of Solitude

Cien años de soledad · published 1967 · ISBN 9780060883287

Gabriel García Márquez — Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) — Colombia, writing in Spanish. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

“for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian novelist and central figure of Latin American magical realism. A journalist by training, affectionately known as "Gabo," he became the most widely read Spanish-language novelist of the twentieth century.

How it came to be

García Márquez wrote the novel in Mexico City around 1965 to 1966, shutting himself away for some eighteen months while the family sold off possessions to survive. Released in 1967, it became the high point of Latin American magical realism and sold tens of millions of copies.

What One Hundred Years of Solitude is about

Seven generations of the Buendía family raise up and then decline alongside the town of Macondo, deep in the Colombian jungle. Amid an endless whirl of desire, war, incest, and solitude, fantastical omens weave through daily life, until the final prophecy is deciphered at the very moment the family vanishes from human memory.

Analysis & legacy

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the summit of magical realism, where the miraculous is told in a deadpan voice while the everyday takes on an air of enchantment. Macondo, from its founding to the moment a hurricane sweeps it out of memory, is Latin America in miniature: settlement, civil war, the banana-company frenzy, then decay. García Márquez builds a spiraling timeline in which the Buendía generations repeat one another's names and mistakes, trapped in an inherited solitude. Published in 1967, the book ignited the Latin American literary "Boom," sold tens of millions of copies, and became one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.

Themes: Magical realism · Solitude · Cyclical time · Latin American history · Family destiny

Rating: 4.1/5 from 86 ratings (Open Library).

What critics say

• the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race — William Kennedy, The National Observer
• Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. — Robert Kiely, The New York Times

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