A masterpiece of magic realism, Márquez’s history of a fictional South American town has a universal message about progress and decay. In Márquez’s imagination, time can be both fast and slow, linear and cyclical. Memory is as burdensome as forgetfulness, but those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
The 1960s saw the entry of Latin American literature onto the world stage. It was characterised by the use of magic realism, the creation of naturalistic worlds in which fantastic, magical events were possible. This literary form perfectly captured the condition of South America at the time, caught between the invasion of modern industrialisation and potent native traditions in which myth was an alternative reality.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of a small Colombian town, Macondo, and seven generations of the Buendia family, who founded it. The qualities of strength and wisdom that established Macondo are diluted in each successive generation, until neither its descendants nor the town are recognisable. Time comes full circle as the latter disappears and the former revert to an animal state.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) uses magic realism, which he described as ‘outsize reality’, to toy with our perceptions. He writes convincing descriptions of poverty, for example, but within that squalid world, can a child really be born with a pig’s tail? Did a priest really levitate? He toys with time, too. Children grow up quickly, but for adults time stands painfully still, and plagues of insomnia or rainfall may last many years.
Márquez further challenges our grip on reality by using only a handful of first names for the Buendias, which recur in each generation. This confuses our sense of time passing, and reinforces two central themes of the novel. First, the mere passage of time does not necessarily imply progress, when even the names remain the same, and second, by passing on only their own names, the isolated Buendias are shown to be always inward looking, never engaging with the wider community or the outside world. The words ‘solitude’ or ‘solitary’ occur on almost every page of the novel.
Macondo descends into dictatorship. While One Hundred Years of Solitude is rooted in South America, the moral and physical collapse of Macondo mirrors the decline of other civilisations, notably ancient Greece, and serves as a warning to us all. Modernity without ethics is not progress.
The name Macondo has entered the language of many Latin American countries as a byword for a place where extraordinary news events happen, or for one’s own slightly quirky hometown. Chilean refugees in Vienna, Austria, fleeing the dictator Pinochet in the 1970s, named their refugee settlement Macondo. Their descendants, and refugees from other regimes, live there still.
At its publication in 1967, it was immediately applauded as the greatest novel in the Spanish language since Don Quixote. The first English translation was published in 1970, and since then it has topped lists of world literature and received many awards, the highest being the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. Its influence has been widespread. V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, for example, all owe Márquez a debt for outsizing their reality, and ours.
