Book Bearings
One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 432 pages · about 7 hours
- First published 1967
- 208 editions
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1 About this book
One Hundred Years of Solitude follows seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, the town that José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán found beside a river after leaving their home village. Over a century the isolated settlement meets travelling gypsies and their inventions, civil wars, the railway and a foreign banana company, while the family repeats the same names, passions and mistakes from one generation to the next. Ghosts, prophecies and impossible events are told in the same matter-of-fact voice as births, marriages and deaths. First published in Spanish in 1967, it is the best-known novel of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and a central work of magical realism.
- Magic realism
- Latin america
- Fantasy
- Social conditions
- Novel
- Epic literature
- Colombian fiction
- American fiction
2 What to expect
A family saga of seven generations in the invented Colombian town of Macondo, where the miraculous is told as plainly as the everyday. Solitude, memory, time that seems to circle back and the history of Latin America are its themes. The prose is dense and flowing, with long paragraphs, little dialogue and many characters who share the same few names, so it asks for patience and attention.
Good for readers who want: magical realism, a multi-generation family saga, and a rich, rewarding classic.
3 About Gabriel García Márquez
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Gabriel García Márquez
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