One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is my favourite book. Its opening lines:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

are effervescent with the promise of great story telling. We realise then that we will have a great journey to travel as the tale unfolds to long before the day of Aureliano’s discovery of ice.

One Hundred Years of Solitude involves the reader with the biography of Macondo, a remote South American settlement, and its founder, José Arcadio Buendía, Aureliano’s father. José Arcadio, a pioneer, a restless inventor “whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic” is so wide-eyed as to deduce for himself that a giant magnet brought by a troop of gypsies will provide the means of extracting gold from the deep reaches of the earth.

Over the one hundred years of the novel, Macondo grows from a collection of 20 or so adobe houses by a river, to a superlatively modern town: all houses have equal amounts of sunlight and are an equal distance from the river. The final phase of Macondo is its decadence which precedes its fall. This mirrors the fate of the Buendía family, growing from José Arcadio and his wife Úrsula Iguarán to a large extended dynasty, moving from intense poverty to ridiculous wealth.

Each character maintains and suffers from their own form of solitude: madness, silence, death or power. José Arcadio Buendía is impulsive and inquisitive, also deeply solitary, alienating himself from other men in his obsessive investigations into mysterious matters. His older child, José Arcadio, inherits his vast physical strength and his impetuousness as well as his name. His younger child, Aureliano, inherits his intense, enigmatic focus. These solitudes are the unshakeable destinies of each of the characters.

As modernity come to the town, the village loses its innocent, solitary state. Through massacres and a rainstorm that lasts for “four years, eleven months, and two days", the town begins to decline as does the Buendía family. They are again solitary after one hundred years of the contaminating influence of contact. In the last scene of the book, the last surviving Buendía translates a set of ancient prophecies and finds that all has been predicted: that the village and its inhabitants have merely been living out a preordained cycle, incorporating great beauty and great, tragic sadness.


I've just finished this for the 4th time: it's a book one can return to after a year or so and find new trails of story to be fascinated by. I thoroughly recommend it.