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By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2004
"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."
It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many
chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts
such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that
defies the laws of physics:
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight
line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a
corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed
through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to
avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair
as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was
getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
"Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.
The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all
sporting variations on their progenitor’s name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano
Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who
struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic
and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break,
dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow’s outlines bleeding through the vibrant
colors of García Márquez’s magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía
has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man’s shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to
clean its wound. Buendía’s wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove
she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."
With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated
into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature.
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