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Overview
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez follows seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, a fictional town in Colombia, from its founding to its disappearance. The book mixes the ordinary and the marvellous so that miracles and political violence appear in the same flat tone. It matters because it shows a family and a nation repeating their mistakes, and because it brought Latin American fiction to a worldwide readership.
Context
García Márquez was a Colombian writer and journalist. The novel draws on Colombian history, including the civil wars of the nineteenth century, foreign-owned banana plantations and a massacre of striking workers in 1928. It appeared in Spanish in 1967 and in Gregory Rabassa's English translation in 1970. García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
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Curator's notes
- Why it matters
- Magical realism; a family and nation repeating its mistakes.
- Use in training and coaching
- Cycles of repetition in families and organisations
- Connects to
- Cervantes; Faulkner
- What to read
- Whole novel
- Text (date)
- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
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