The idea of a new novel, which in the original version he wanted to call "The House", had been ripening with him for a long time. He even managed to describe some of his characters on the pages of his previous books. The novel was conceived as a wide epic canvas describing the life of numerous representatives of seven generations of the same family, so it took Marquez all the main time to work on it. He had to leave all other work. Having mortgaged the car, Marquez gave this money to his wife so that she could support their two sons and provide the writer with paper, coffee, cigarettes and some food. I must say that in the end the family even had to sell household appliances, since there was no money at all.
As a result of continuous 18-month work, the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was born, so unusual and original that many publishing houses where Marquez applied to him simply refused to publish it, not at all confident in its success with the public. The first edition of the novel was published in only 8,000 copies.
Chronicle of one family
According to its literary genre, the novel belongs to the so-called magical realism. Reality, mysticism and fantasy are so closely intertwined in it that somehow it is simply impossible to separate them, therefore the unreality of what is happening in it becomes the most tangible reality."One Hundred Years of Solitude" describes the story of only one family, but this is not at all a list of events taking place with the heroes. This is a looped time that began to twist its spirals of family history with incest and ended this story with incest too. The Colombian tradition of giving children the same family names further emphasizes this circularity and inevitable cyclicity, feeling which all representatives of the Buendia family always experience inner loneliness and accept it with philosophical doom.
In fact, it is simply impossible to retell the content of this work. Like any great work, it is written only for one specific reader and that reader is you. Everyone perceives and understands it in their own way. Perhaps that is why, while many of Marquez's works have already been filmed, none of the directors undertakes to transfer the heroes of this mystical novel to the screen.
Dedicated to Homi Garcia Ascot and Maria Luisa Elio
Many years later, just before the execution, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would recall that distant day when his father took him to look at the ice.
Macondo was then a small village of twenty adobe houses with reed roofs, standing on the banks of the river, which carried its transparent waters along a bed of white, smooth and huge, like prehistoric eggs, boulders. The world was so primordial that many things had no name and were simply poked with a finger. Every year in March, a shabby gypsy tribe set up their tent near the village, and to the sonorous rattle of tambourines and the screech of whistles, the newcomers showed the residents the latest inventions. First they brought a magnet. A stocky gypsy with a shaggy beard and sparrow-like hands gave his name - Melkiades - and began to demonstrate to the stunned spectators nothing but the eighth wonder of the world, created, according to him, by alchemist scientists from Macedonia. The gypsy went from house to house, shaking two bars of iron, and people shuddered in horror, seeing how basins, pots, braziers and tongs bounce in place, how boards creak, with difficulty holding nails and bolts torn from them, and gizmos, long ago - long-disappeared, appear exactly where everything was dug up in their search, and rush in a crowd to the magical iron of Melquiades. “Every thing is alive,” the gypsy announced categorically and sternly. “You just need to be able to wake her soul.” José Arcadio Buendia, whose unbridled imagination surpassed the miraculous genius of nature itself and even the power of magic and sorcery, thought it would be a good idea to adapt this generally worthless discovery to extract gold from the earth. Melquíades, being a decent man, warned: "Nothing will work." But Jose Arcadio Buendia did not yet believe in the decency of the gypsies and traded his mule and several kids for two magnetized pieces of iron. Ursula Iguaran, his wife, wanted to increase the modest family wealth at the expense of livestock, but all her persuasion was in vain. “Soon we will fill up the house with gold, there will be nowhere to put it,” the husband answered. For several months in a row, he zealously defended the irrefutability of his words. Step by step, he combed the area, even the riverbed, dragging two iron bars behind him on a rope and repeating the spell of Melquiades in a loud voice. The only thing he managed to find in the bowels of the earth was rusted through military armor of the fifteenth century, dully clinking when tapped, like a dry gourd stuffed with stones. When José Arcadio Buendia and his four assistants sorted the find apart, under the armor was a whitish skeleton, on the dark vertebrae of which an amulet with a woman's curl dangled.
In March the gypsies came again. This time they brought a spyglass and a magnifying glass the size of a tambourine and passed them off as the latest invention of the Jews from Amsterdam. They planted their gypsy at the other end of the village, and put a pipe at the entrance to the tent. Having paid five reais, people stuck their eyes to the pipe and saw the gypsy in front of them in great detail. “There are no distances for science,” Melquíades said. “Soon a person, without leaving his home, will see everything that is happening in any corner of the earth.” Once on a hot afternoon, the gypsies, manipulating their huge magnifying glass, staged a stunning spectacle: they directed a beam of sunlight onto a pile of hay thrown in the middle of the street, and the hay blazed with fire. José Arcadio Buendia, who could not calm down after the failure of his venture with magnets, immediately realized that this glass could be used as a military weapon. Melquíades again tried to dissuade him. But in the end, the gypsy agreed to give him a magnifying glass in exchange for two magnets and three gold colonial coins. Ursula sobbed with grief. This money had to be pulled out of a chest of gold doubloons, which her father had saved all his life, denying himself an extra piece, and which she kept in the far corner under the bed in the hope that a happy opportunity would turn up for their successful use. José Arcadio Buendia did not even deign to console his wife, giving himself up to his endless experiments with the ardor of a true researcher and even at the risk of his own life. In an effort to prove the destructive effect of a magnifying glass on the manpower of the enemy, he focused the sun's rays on himself and received severe burns that turned into ulcers that healed with difficulty. Why, he would not have spared his own house, if not for the stormy protests of his wife, frightened by his dangerous tricks. José Arcadio spent long hours in his room, calculating the strategic combat effectiveness of the latest weapons, and even wrote instructions on how to use them. This remarkably lucid and irresistibly sound instruction he sent to the authorities, along with numerous descriptions of his experiments and several rolls of explanatory drawings. His messenger crossed the mountains, miraculously got out of the endless quagmire, swam across the turbulent rivers, barely escaped from wild animals and almost died from despair and all kinds of infection before he reached the road where the mail was carried on mules. Although a trip to the capital was at that time an almost unrealistic undertaking, José Arcadio Buendia promised to come at the first order of the Government to demonstrate his invention to the military authorities in practice and personally teach them the complex art of solar wars. He waited several years for an answer. Finally, desperate to wait for something, he shared his grief with Melquiades, and then the gypsy presented an indisputable proof of his decency: taking back the magnifying glass, he returned the golden doubloons to him, and even gave several Portuguese nautical charts and some navigational instruments. The gypsy personally wrote for him a short summary of the teachings of the monk Herman on how to use the astrolabe, compass and sextant. José Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a shed specially attached to the house so that no one would disturb him in his explorations. In the dry season, completely neglecting household chores, he spent nights on the patio, watching the course of celestial bodies, and almost got a sunstroke, trying to accurately determine the zenith. When he mastered the knowledge and tools to perfection, he had a blissful sense of the immensity of space, which allowed him to navigate unfamiliar seas and oceans, visit uninhabited lands and engage in intercourse with delightful creatures without leaving his scientific office. It was at this time that he acquired the habit of talking to himself, walking around the house and not noticing anyone, while Ursula worked hard with the children on the ground, growing cassava, yams and malanga, pumpkins and eggplants, tending bananas. However, for no apparent reason, José Arcadio Buendía's feverish activity suddenly ceased, giving way to a strange numbness. For several days he sat as if spellbound and moved his lips incessantly, as if repeating some amazing truth, and he himself could not believe himself. Finally, one December Tuesday, at dinner, he threw off the burden of secret experiences at once. His children, for the rest of their lives, will remember the majestic solemnity with which their father took his place at the head of the table, shaking as if in a fever, exhausted by insomnia and frenzied brain work, and announced his discovery: "Our earth is round like an orange." Ursula's patience snapped: “If you want to completely go crazy, it's up to you. But don’t fill the brains of children with gypsy nonsense.” José Arcadio Buendía, however, did not bat an eyelid as his wife slammed the astrolabe on the floor in anger. He made another one, gathered fellow villagers in a shed and, relying on a theory in which none of them understood anything, said that if you sail east all the time, you can again find yourself at the point of departure.
The town of Macondo was beginning to think that José Arcadio Buendía had gone mad, but then Melquíades came and put everything in its place. He publicly paid tribute to the mind of a man who, observing the course of the heavenly bodies, theoretically proved what has long been practically proven, although not yet known to the inhabitants of Macondo, and as a token of his admiration, presented José Arcadio Buendia with a gift that was destined to determine the future settlement: a complete set of alchemical utensils.
Dedicated to Homi Garcia Ascot and Maria Luisa Elio
Many years later, just before the execution, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would recall that distant day when his father took him to look at the ice.
Macondo was then a small village of twenty adobe houses with reed roofs, standing on the banks of the river, which carried its transparent waters along a bed of white, smooth and huge, like prehistoric eggs, boulders. The world was so primordial that many things had no name and were simply poked with a finger. Every year in March, a shabby gypsy tribe set up their tent near the village, and to the sonorous rattle of tambourines and the screech of whistles, the newcomers showed the residents the latest inventions. First they brought a magnet. A stocky gypsy with a shaggy beard and sparrow-like hands gave his name - Melkiades - and began to demonstrate to the stunned spectators nothing but the eighth wonder of the world, created, according to him, by alchemist scientists from Macedonia. The gypsy went from house to house, shaking two bars of iron, and people shuddered in horror, seeing how basins, pots, braziers and tongs bounce in place, how boards creak, with difficulty holding nails and bolts torn from them, and gizmos, long ago - long-disappeared, appear exactly where everything was dug up in their search, and rush in a crowd to the magical iron of Melquiades. “Every thing is alive,” the gypsy announced categorically and sternly. “You just need to be able to wake her soul.” José Arcadio Buendia, whose unbridled imagination surpassed the miraculous genius of nature itself and even the power of magic and sorcery, thought it would be a good idea to adapt this generally worthless discovery to extract gold from the earth. Melquíades, being a decent man, warned: "Nothing will work." But Jose Arcadio Buendia did not yet believe in the decency of the gypsies and traded his mule and several kids for two magnetized pieces of iron. Ursula Iguaran, his wife, wanted to increase the modest family wealth at the expense of livestock, but all her persuasion was in vain. “Soon we will fill up the house with gold, there will be nowhere to put it,” the husband answered. For several months in a row, he zealously defended the irrefutability of his words. Step by step, he combed the area, even the riverbed, dragging two iron bars behind him on a rope and repeating the spell of Melquiades in a loud voice. The only thing he managed to find in the bowels of the earth was rusted through military armor of the fifteenth century, dully clinking when tapped, like a dry gourd stuffed with stones. When José Arcadio Buendia and his four assistants sorted the find apart, under the armor was a whitish skeleton, on the dark vertebrae of which an amulet with a woman's curl dangled.
In March the gypsies came again. This time they brought a spyglass and a magnifying glass the size of a tambourine and passed them off as the latest invention of the Jews from Amsterdam. They planted their gypsy at the other end of the village, and put a pipe at the entrance to the tent. Having paid five reais, people stuck their eyes to the pipe and saw the gypsy in front of them in great detail. “There are no distances for science,” Melquíades said. “Soon a person, without leaving his home, will see everything that is happening in any corner of the earth.” Once on a hot afternoon, the gypsies, manipulating their huge magnifying glass, staged a stunning spectacle: they directed a beam of sunlight onto a pile of hay thrown in the middle of the street, and the hay blazed with fire. José Arcadio Buendia, who could not calm down after the failure of his venture with magnets, immediately realized that this glass could be used as a military weapon. Melquíades again tried to dissuade him. But in the end, the gypsy agreed to give him a magnifying glass in exchange for two magnets and three gold colonial coins. Ursula sobbed with grief. This money had to be pulled out of a chest of gold doubloons, which her father had saved all his life, denying himself an extra piece, and which she kept in the far corner under the bed in the hope that a happy opportunity would turn up for their successful use. José Arcadio Buendia did not even deign to console his wife, giving himself up to his endless experiments with the ardor of a true researcher and even at the risk of his own life. In an effort to prove the destructive effect of a magnifying glass on the manpower of the enemy, he focused the sun's rays on himself and received severe burns that turned into ulcers that healed with difficulty. Why, he would not have spared his own house, if not for the stormy protests of his wife, frightened by his dangerous tricks. José Arcadio spent long hours in his room, calculating the strategic combat effectiveness of the latest weapons, and even wrote instructions on how to use them. This remarkably lucid and irresistibly sound instruction he sent to the authorities, along with numerous descriptions of his experiments and several rolls of explanatory drawings. His messenger crossed the mountains, miraculously got out of the endless quagmire, swam across the turbulent rivers, barely escaped from wild animals and almost died from despair and all kinds of infection before he reached the road where the mail was carried on mules. Although a trip to the capital was at that time an almost unrealistic undertaking, José Arcadio Buendia promised to come at the first order of the Government to demonstrate his invention to the military authorities in practice and personally teach them the complex art of solar wars. He waited several years for an answer. Finally, desperate to wait for something, he shared his grief with Melquiades, and then the gypsy presented an indisputable proof of his decency: taking back the magnifying glass, he returned the golden doubloons to him, and even gave several Portuguese nautical charts and some navigational instruments. The gypsy personally wrote for him a short summary of the teachings of the monk Herman on how to use the astrolabe, compass and sextant. José Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a shed specially attached to the house so that no one would disturb him in his explorations. In the dry season, completely neglecting household chores, he spent nights on the patio, watching the course of celestial bodies, and almost got a sunstroke, trying to accurately determine the zenith. When he mastered the knowledge and tools to perfection, he had a blissful sense of the immensity of space, which allowed him to navigate unfamiliar seas and oceans, visit uninhabited lands and engage in intercourse with delightful creatures without leaving his scientific office. It was at this time that he acquired the habit of talking to himself, walking around the house and not noticing anyone, while Ursula worked hard with the children on the ground, growing cassava, yams and malanga, pumpkins and eggplants, tending bananas. However, for no apparent reason, José Arcadio Buendía's feverish activity suddenly ceased, giving way to a strange numbness. For several days he sat as if spellbound and moved his lips incessantly, as if repeating some amazing truth, and he himself could not believe himself. Finally, one December Tuesday, at dinner, he threw off the burden of secret experiences at once. His children, for the rest of their lives, will remember the majestic solemnity with which their father took his place at the head of the table, shaking as if in a fever, exhausted by insomnia and frenzied brain work, and announced his discovery: "Our earth is round like an orange." Ursula's patience snapped: “If you want to completely go crazy, it's up to you. But don’t fill the brains of children with gypsy nonsense.” José Arcadio Buendía, however, did not bat an eyelid as his wife slammed the astrolabe on the floor in anger. He made another one, gathered fellow villagers in a shed and, relying on a theory in which none of them understood anything, said that if you sail east all the time, you can again find yourself at the point of departure.
The town of Macondo was beginning to think that José Arcadio Buendía had gone mad, but then Melquíades came and put everything in its place. He publicly paid tribute to the mind of a man who, observing the course of the heavenly bodies, theoretically proved what has long been practically proven, although not yet known to the inhabitants of Macondo, and as a token of his admiration, presented José Arcadio Buendia with a gift that was destined to determine the future settlement: a complete set of alchemical utensils.
By this time, Melquíades had already noticeably aged. In the years of his first visits to Macondo, he seemed to be the same age as José Arcadio Buendia. But if he had not yet lost his strength, which allowed him to bring the horse to the ground, grabbing it by the ears, then the gypsy seemed to be ailing from some insurmountable disease. In fact, these were the consequences of many exotic ailments, picked up by him in countless wanderings around the wide world. He himself told, helping Jose Arcadio Buendia to arrange his alchemical laboratory, that death threatened him at every step, grabbed him by the trouser leg, but did not dare to finish him off. He managed to evade many troubles and catastrophes that executed the human race. He escaped from pellagra in Persia, from scurvy in Malaysia, from leprosy in Alexandria, from beriberi in Japan, from bubonic plague in Madagascar, survived an earthquake in Sicily and a terrible shipwreck in the Strait of Magellan. This wizard, who said that he knew the origins of the magic of Nostradamus, was a sad person who evoked sadness; his gypsy eyes seemed to see through both things and people. He wore a large black hat, the wide brim of which fluttered like the wings of a raven, and a velvet waistcoat green with the patina of the ages. But for all his deep wisdom and incomprehensible essence, he was the flesh of the flesh of earthly creatures, stuck in the nets of the problems of everyday life. He was plagued by senile ailments, he was spoiled by petty spending, he could not laugh for a long time because scurvy had pulled out all his teeth. José Arcadbo Buendia was sure that it was on that sweltering afternoon, when the gypsy told him his secrets, that their close friendship was born. The children, with their mouths open, listened to wonderful stories. Aureliano - at that time a five-year-old baby - will remember Melquiades for life, who sat at the window under the streams of the molten sun and with his low, sonorous voice, like an organ, spoke clearly and understandably about the darkest and incomprehensible phenomena of nature, and crawled down his temples hot drops of oily sweat. José Arcadio, Aureliano's older brother, bequeaths the indelible impression left by this man to all his offspring. Ursula, on the other hand, will long remember the visit of the gypsy with disgust, because she entered the room just as Melquíades, with a wave of his hand, broke the vial of mercuric chloride.
"That's what the devil smells like," she said.
“Nothing of the kind,” Melquíades protested. “It has been proven that the devil smells of sulphur, and this is just a slight smell of sublimate.
And in continuation of his revelations, he began to talk about the diabolical properties of cinnabar, but Ursula, not listening to him, took the children away to pray to God. The nauseating smell will forever merge in her memory with the image of Melquiades.
The primitive laboratory had, in addition to many pots, funnels, retorts and filters, a small oven, a glass flask with a long neck (a kind of imitation of the "philosopher's egg") and a distiller, which the gypsies themselves made, guided by the latest descriptions of the three-pipe alembic of Mary of Judea. Among other things, Melquiades gave samples of seven metals corresponding to the seven planets; showed the formulas of Moses and Zosima for the production of gold, left drawings and notes that reveal the secret of the Great Sediment and allow those who understand them to create a philosopher's stone. Seduced by the simplicity of the formula for obtaining gold, José Arcadio Buendía drove up to Ursula for several weeks and so, so that she pulled out all her gold coins into the light of God and allowed them to increase their number by as much as a can of mercury could be poured into drops. Ursula, as usual, succumbed to her husband's bullish stubbornness. José Arcadio Buendía throws thirty doubloons into a crucible and, adding copper filings, orpiments, mercury and lead, fuses everything together. The resulting ingot is thrown into a cauldron of castor oil and boiled over high heat until the oil turns into a thick, smelly brew that looks more like cheap jam than precious metal. After dangerous and desperate experiments in evaporating the liquid, welding the ingot to the seven planetary metals, treating it with hermetic mercury and vitriol, and after re-boiling in lard - for lack of burdock oil - Ursula's most valuable inheritance turned into a piece of charred roast, tightly baked to the bottom boiler.
When the gypsies appeared again, Ursula had already managed to turn the whole village against them. But curiosity overcame fear, for this time the gypsies beat their tambourines and drums furiously, and the herald announced that the most amazing discovery of some Nazians would be put on display. And the people rushed to the tent, paid a centavo, and Melquiades appeared before them - dashing, fit, smooth-faced, with white shining teeth. Those who remembered his scurvy-eaten gums, his sunken cheeks and chewed lips, were seized with superstitious horror before this irrefutable proof of the supernatural abilities of the gypsy. Horror turned into indescribable astonishment when Melquíades pulled both jaws out of his mouth along with pink gums and waved them for a minute in front of the audience, for that short minute again becoming an old man shabby by life - then he put his teeth back in place and again smiled broadly in the proud consciousness of his returned youth . Even Jose Arcadio Buendia himself thought that Melquíades' capabilities bordered on the omnipotence of Satan, but his heart was relieved when the gypsy revealed to him the secret of false teeth. It turned out to be so simple, although it looked so fantastic, that José Arcadio Buendia immediately lost all interest in alchemical experiments. He was again overwhelmed by the blues, he lost his appetite and wandered aimlessly around the house from morning to evening. “Incredible things are happening in the world,” he told Ursula. “Even nearby, at the other end of the lowland, there are so many wonderful ideas, and we live here like a herd of donkeys.” People who had known him since the founding of Macondo wondered how he had changed under the influence of Melquíades.
Formerly José Arcadio Buendía was a kind of young patriarch who told when to sow, advised how to raise children and care for cattle, and himself helped others, not shying from hard work, so that peace and order reigned in the community. Since his house was built first, and besides, it was solid and beautiful, people in the village built their dwellings according to his model and likeness. Buendia's house had a bright and large guest room, a dining room on a terrace covered with bright flowers, two bedrooms, a patio with a giant chestnut tree, and near the house there was a large well-groomed vegetable garden and a corral where goats, pigs and chickens peacefully coexisted. In this house, as, indeed, in the whole village, only one living creature was not kept - fighting cocks.
In work, Ursula did not lag behind her husband. A dexterous, meticulous, solid woman with strong nerves, who did not know what it was to sing songs, and knew how to keep up everywhere at once, rustling in the house from morning to evening with her light linen skirts. Thanks to her, the earthen floor, the adobe walls, the rough homemade furniture were perfectly clean, and the old chests where the clothes were stored exuded a faint aroma of albaaki.
José Arcadio Buendia, who was the most savvy man in the village, suggested building houses in such an order that it would be equally convenient for everyone to go down to the river for water, and to break through the streets among the trees in such a way that in the midday heat each house would not roast in the sun any more, than the neighboring one. In a few years, Macondo has become the most prosperous and comfortable village of all those that have ever seen its three hundred inhabitants. It really was a happy village, where no one was over thirty and where no one had yet died. During the founding years of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendia began to make cages and snares. Very soon, orioles, canaries, robins and tits filled not only his house, but all the houses of the village. The discordant bird concerts drove everyone crazy, and Ursula plugged her ears with beeswax so that the mind would not go beyond reason from the ringing. When the relatives of Melquíades first appeared in Macondo to sell glass balls for headaches, people were surprised how the newcomers managed to find the village, lost among the drowsy swamps and forests, and the gypsies admitted that they were brought here by a shrill bird noise.
However, José Arcadio Buendía's addiction to social activities somehow suddenly disappeared, giving way to magnetic fever, astronomical calculations, an effort to change the nature of metals and a thirst to know the wonders of the world. The active and neat José Arcadio Buendía was transformed into a seemingly useless, untidy man with a shaggy beard, which Úrsula, with considerable effort, trimmed with a kitchen knife. Some considered him a victim of black witchcraft. But even those who were sure that he was not quite himself left work and home and followed him when, resting an ax with a spade on his shoulder, he addressed the people with an appeal to the people together to break the path from Macondo to great world achievements.
José Arcadio Buendía was completely ignorant of the topography of the area. He only knew that an impregnable mountain range stretched to the east, and that on the other side of the mountains lay the ancient city of Riohacha, where in the old days - as his grandfather, the first Aureliano Buendia told him - Sir Francis Drake liked to shoot cannons at crocodiles, which then gutted, patched up, stuffed with straw and sent as a gift to Queen Elizabeth. In their youth, José Arcadio Buendia and other boys, taking their wives, cattle and household goods, managed to cross the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, but after more than two years of wandering, they abandoned their venture and founded Macondo so as not to drag back. Therefore, he was not at all attracted by the path to the east, which could only lead to the past. To the south stretched a swampy lowland covered with an evergreen living carpet, and this boundless swampy universe, according to the gypsies, really had no limits. To the west, the Great Swamp merged with the boundless water element, where soft-skinned cetacean mermaids maddened sailors with their seductively large breasts. The gypsies sailed this way for half a year until they reached a strip of solid ground where mail mules walked. According to the calculations of José Arcadio Buendia, the only way to break through to civilization was to go north. And he supplied the same men who built Macondo with tools and hunting rifles, put orientation devices and maps in a knapsack, and the detachment embarked on a risky adventure.
Gabriel Jose de la Concordia "Gabo" Garcia Marquez
Colombian novelist, journalist, publisher and political activist. Winner of the Neustadt Prize for Literature and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Representative of the literary direction "magic realism".
Born in the Colombian town of Aracataca (Department of Magdalena) in the family of Eligio Garcia and Luisa Santiago Marquez.
In 1940, at the age of 13, Gabriel received a scholarship and began his studies at the Jesuit College of the town of Zipaquira, 30 km north of Bogotá. In 1946, at the insistence of his parents, he entered the National University of Bogota at the Faculty of Law. Then he met his future wife, Mercedes Barcha Pardo.
From 1950 to 1952 he wrote a column for the local newspaper El Heraldo» in Barranquilla. During this time, he became an active member of an informal group of writers and journalists known as Barranquilla Group which inspired him to start a literary career. In parallel, Garcia Marquez is engaged in writing, writing stories and screenplays. In 1961, he published the story "No one writes to the Colonel" ( El coronel no tiene quien le escriba).
World fame brought him the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" ( Cien anos de soledad, 1967). In 1972, he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for this novel.
"From those years of loneliness"
One Hundred Years of Solitude was written by García Márquez in 18 months between 1965 and 1966 in Mexico City. The original idea for this work came about in 1952, when the author visited his native village of Arakataka in the company of his mother. In his short story "The Day After Saturday", published in 1954, Macondo appears for the first time. García Márquez planned to call his new novel The House, but eventually changed his mind to avoid analogies with the novel The Big House, published in 1954 by his friend Alvaro Zamudio.
“... I had a wife and two little sons. I worked as a PR manager and edited film scripts. But to write a book, you had to give up work. I pawned the car and gave the money to Mercedes?des. Every day, one way or another, she got me paper, cigarettes, everything I needed for work. When the book was finished, it turned out that we owed the butcher 5,000 pesos - a lot of money. There was a rumor going around that I was writing a very important book, and all the shopkeepers wanted to take part. To send the text to the publisher, I needed 160 pesos, and only 80 remained. Then I pawned the mixer and the Mercedes hair dryer. Upon learning of this, she said: “It was not enough that the novel turned out to be bad.”
From an interview with Garcia Marquez Esquire
"From those years of loneliness" summary of the novel
The founders of the Buendia family, José Arcadio and Ursula, were cousins. Relatives were afraid that they would give birth to a child with a pig tail. Ursula knows about the dangers of incestuous marriage, and Jose Arcadio does not want to take into account such nonsense. Over the course of a year and a half of marriage, Ursula manages to maintain her innocence, the nights of the newlyweds are filled with a painful and cruel struggle that replaces love joys. During cockfights, the rooster José Arcadio defeats the rooster Prudencio Aguilar, and he, annoyed, mocks the opponent, questioning his manhood, since Ursula is still a virgin. Outraged, José Arcadio goes home for a spear and kills Prudencio, and then, brandishing the same spear, forces Ursula to fulfill her marital duties. But from now on, they have no rest from the bloodied ghost of Aguilar. Deciding to move to a new place of residence, José Arcadio, as if making a sacrifice, kills all his roosters, buries a spear in the yard and leaves the village with his wife and the villagers. Twenty-two brave men overcome an impregnable mountain range in search of the sea and, after two years of fruitless wanderings, they establish the village of Macondo on the banks of the river - Jose Arcadio had a prophetic indication of this in a dream. And now, in a large clearing, two dozen huts made of clay and bamboo grow.
Jose Arcadio burns a passion for knowing the world - more than anything else, he is attracted by various wonderful things that the gypsies who appear once a year deliver to the village: magnet bars, a magnifying glass, navigation instruments; from their leader Melquiades, he also learns the secrets of alchemy, exhausts himself with long vigils and the feverish work of an inflamed imagination. Having lost interest in another extravagant undertaking, he returns to a measured working life, equips the village together with his neighbors, demarcates the land, paves the roads. Life in Macondo is patriarchal, respectable, happy, there is not even a cemetery here, because no one dies. Ursula starts a profitable production of animals and birds from candy. But with the appearance in the house of Buendia, who knows where Rebeca came from, who becomes their adopted daughter, an epidemic of insomnia begins in Macondo. The inhabitants of the village diligently redo all their affairs and begin to toil with painful idleness. And then another misfortune hits Macondo - an epidemic of forgetfulness. Everyone lives in a reality that constantly eludes them, forgetting the names of objects. They decide to hang signs on them, but they fear that after time they will not be able to remember the purpose of the objects.
José Arcadio intends to build a memory machine, but a wandering gypsy, the magician Melquíades, comes to the rescue with his healing potion. According to his prophecy, Macondo will disappear from the face of the earth, and in its place a sparkling city will grow with large houses made of transparent glass, but there will be no trace of the Buendia family in it. Jose Arcadio does not want to believe it: Buendia will always be. Melquíades introduces Jose Arcadio to another wonderful invention that is destined to play a fatal role in his destiny. The most audacious undertaking of José Arcadio is to capture God with the help of daguerreotype in order to scientifically prove the existence of the Almighty or disprove it. Eventually Buendía goes mad and ends his days chained to a large chestnut tree in his backyard.
In the firstborn José Arcadio, named the same as his father, his aggressive sexuality was embodied. He wastes years of his life on countless adventures. The second son, Aureliano, absent-minded and lethargic, is mastering jewelry making. In the meantime, the village is growing, turning into a provincial town, acquiring a corregidor, a priest, an institution of Katarino - the first breach in the wall of "good morals" of the Makondos. Aureliano's imagination is stunned by the beauty of the daughter of Corregidor Remedios. And Rebeca and another daughter of Ursula Amaranta fall in love with an Italian piano master, Pietro Crespi. There are violent quarrels, jealousy boils, but in the end, Rebeca prefers the “supermale” Jose Arcadio, who, ironically, is overtaken by a quiet family life under the heel of his wife and a bullet fired by an unknown person, most likely the same wife. Rebeca decides to go into seclusion, burying herself alive in the house. Out of cowardice, selfishness and fear, Amaranta refuses love, in her declining years she begins to weave a shroud for herself and fades away, having finished it. When Remedios dies from childbirth, Aureliano, oppressed by disappointed hopes, remains in a passive, dreary state. However, the cynical machinations of his father-corregidor with ballots during the elections and the arbitrariness of the military in his hometown force him to leave to fight on the side of the liberals, although politics seems to him something abstract. The war forges his character, but devastates his soul, since, in essence, the struggle for national interests has long turned into a struggle for power.
The grandson of Ursula Arcadio, a school teacher, appointed during the war years as the civil and military ruler of Macondo, behaves like an autocratic owner, becoming a local tyrant, and at the next change of power in the town he is shot by conservatives.
Aureliano Buendia becomes the supreme commander of the revolutionary forces, but gradually realizes that he is fighting only out of pride and decides to end the war in order to free himself. On the day of the signing of the truce, he tries to commit suicide, but fails. Then he returns to the ancestral home, renounces his lifelong pension and lives apart from his family and, having closed himself in splendid solitude, is engaged in the manufacture of goldfish with emerald eyes.
Civilization comes to Macondo: the railway, electricity, cinema, telephone, and at the same time an avalanche of foreigners falls, establishing a banana company on these fertile lands. And now the once heavenly corner has been turned into a haunting place, a cross between a fair, a rooming house and a brothel. Seeing the disastrous changes, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who for many years deliberately fenced himself off from the surrounding reality, feels a dull rage and regret that he did not bring the war to a decisive end. His seventeen sons by seventeen different women, the eldest of whom was under thirty-five, were killed on the same day. Doomed to remain in the desert of loneliness, he dies near the mighty old chestnut tree growing in the courtyard of the house.
Ursula watches with concern the folly of her descendants. War, fighting cocks, bad women and crazy ideas - these are the four disasters that caused the decline of the Buendia family, she believes and laments: the great-grandchildren of Aureliano Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo collected all the family vices without inheriting a single family virtue. The beauty of the great-granddaughter Remedios the Beautiful spreads the destructive breath of death around, but here the girl, strange, alien to all conventions, incapable of love and not knowing this feeling, obeying free attraction, ascends on freshly washed and hung out to dry sheets, picked up by the wind. The dashing reveler Aureliano Segundo marries the aristocrat Fernanda del Carpio, but spends a lot of time away from home, with his mistress Petra Cotes. Jose Arcadio Segundo breeds fighting cocks, prefers the company of French hetaerae. The turning point in him comes when he narrowly escapes death in the shooting of striking banana company workers. Driven by fear, he hides in the abandoned room of Melquiades, where he suddenly finds peace and plunges into the study of the sorcerer's parchments. In his eyes, the brother sees a repetition of the irreparable fate of his great-grandfather. And over Macondo it begins to rain, and it pours for four years, eleven months and two days. After the rain, lethargic, slow people cannot resist the insatiable voracity of oblivion.
Ursula's last years are overshadowed by the struggle with Fernanda, a hard-hearted hypocrite who has made lies and hypocrisy the basis of family life. She brings up her son as an idler, imprisons her daughter Meme, who has sinned with the artisan, in a monastery. Macondo, from which the banana company has squeezed all the juices, is reaching the limit of launch. In this dead town, covered with dust and exhausted by heat, after the death of his mother, José Arcadio, the son of Fernanda, returns and finds the illegitimate nephew Aureliano Babilonho in the devastated family nest. Maintaining a languid dignity and aristocratic manner, he devotes his time to lascivious games, and Aureliano in Melquíades' room is immersed in the translation of encrypted verses of old parchments and makes progress in the study of Sanskrit.
Coming from Europe, where she received her education, Amaranta Ursula is obsessed with the dream of reviving Macondo. Smart and energetic, she tries to breathe life into the local human society, pursued by misfortunes, but to no avail. Reckless, destructive, all-consuming passion connects Aureliano with his aunt. A young couple is expecting a child, Amaranta Ursula hopes that he is destined to revive the family and cleanse it of fatal vices and a call to loneliness. The baby is the only one of all Buendia born over the course of a century, conceived in love, but he is born with a pig's tail, and Amaranta Ursula dies of bleeding. The last of the Buendia family is destined to be eaten by the red ants that infest the house. With ever-increasing gusts of wind, Aureliano reads the history of the Buendia family in the parchments of Melquiades, learning that he was not destined to leave the room, because according to the prophecy, the city will be swept off the face of the earth by a hurricane and erased from the memory of people at the very moment when he finishes deciphering the parchments.
Source - Wikipedia, Briefly.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - "One Hundred Years of Solitude" - summary of the novel updated: December 10, 2017 by: website
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the creator of the wonderful novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book was published in the second half of the 20th century. It has been translated into over 30 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. The novel received wide popularity, it raises questions that will always be relevant: the search for truth, the diversity of life, the inevitability of death, loneliness.
The novel tells the story of one fictional city of Macondo and one family. This story is unusual, tragic and comical at the same time. Using the example of one Buendia family, the writer talks about all people. The city is presented from the moment of its inception to the moment of its collapse. Despite the fact that the name of the city is fictitious, the events taking place in it noticeably echo the real events that took place in Colombia.
The founder of the city of Macondo was José Arcadio Buendia, who settled in it with his wife Ursula. Gradually, the city began to flourish, children were born, and the population grew. Jose Arcadio was interested in secret knowledge, magic, something unusual. They had children with Ursula who were not like other people, but at the same time they were very different from each other. Subsequently, the history of this family is told over a century long: the children and grandchildren of the founders, their relationship, love; civil war, power, period of economic development and decline of the town.
The names of the heroes of the novel are constantly repeated, as if showing that everything in their life is cyclical, that they repeat their mistakes over and over again. The author raises the theme of incest in the work, starting with the founders of the city, former relatives, and ending with the story of the relationship between aunt and nephew and the complete destruction of the city, which was predicted in advance. The relationship of the characters is complex, but they all wanted to love and loved, they started families and children. However, each of them was lonely in his own way, the whole history of their family from the moment of birth to the death of the last representative of the family is a history of loneliness that lasted more than a century.
On our site you can download the book "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Marquez Gabriel Garcia for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy a book in an online store.
