One hundred years of solitude summary
Answers
One Hundred Years of Solitude
NOVEL BY GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
WRITTEN BY: Drew Milne
See Article History
This contribution has not yet been formally edited by Britannica. Learn more.
Alternative Title: “Cien años de soledad”
One Hundred Years of Solitude, novel by Gabriel García Márquez, published in Spanish as Cien años de soledad in 1967. It was considered the author’s masterpiece and the foremost example of his style of magic realism.
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, 1990.
Graziano Arici/AGE fotostock
SUMMARY: This is the author’s epic tale of seven generations of the Buendía family that also spans a hundred years of turbulent Latin American history, from the postcolonial 1820s to the 1920s. Patriarch José Arcadio Buendía builds the utopian city of Macondo in the middle of a swamp. At first prosperous, the town attracts Gypsies and hucksters—among them the old writer Melquíades, a stand-in for the author. A tropical storm lasting nearly five years almost destroys the town, and by the fifth Buendía generation its physical decrepitude is matched by the family’s depravity. A hurricane finally erases all traces of the city.
By the end of the novel Melquíades has been revealed as the narrator; his mysterious manuscripts are in fact the text of the novel. Critics have noted the influence of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in the book’s labyrinthine fantasy