HUNDREDS OF SOLITUDE

From Jose Arcadio to Aureliano, from the discovery of the ice to the decipherment of the scrolls of Melquíades: seven generations of Buendía pursue an inevitable destiny. With this tumultuous novel that uses the tones of fable, supported by a portentous language and a prodigious fantasy, Gabriel García Márquez has been able to re-establish reality and, through Macondo, create a real paradigm of human existence. A universe of crossed solitudes, impenetrable and eternal, in which a multitude of heroes floats.

The novel, written in 18 months, [2]. it is considered the author’s major work; originally published by the South American publishing house in Buenos Aires in June 1967, it sold eight thousand copies in two weeks; over the next 3 years 600,000 copies. It was later translated into 37 languages ​​selling more than 20 million copies. [3] [4] The style of the novel, the famous magical realism, and the thematic subject mean that one hundred years of solitude becomes representative of the Latin American boom of the sixties and seventies.

Description:

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that remote afternoon when his father
had brought him to know the ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty mud houses and reeds built on the banks of a river with diaphanous waters that rushed on a bed of smooth stones, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs.

The world was so recent that many things were nameless, and to mention them it was necessary to indicate them with a finger. Every year, in the month of March, a family of ragged gypsies pitched the tent near the village, and with great din of whistles and timbales came to introduce the new inventions.

First they brought the magnet. A burly gypsy, with a wild beard and sparrow’s hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, gave a grim public demonstration of what he called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal bars, and everyone got frightened seeing that cauldrons, pans, pincers and stoves fell to the ground, and the woods crackled with the desperation of the nails and screws that tried to untangle themselves, and also the objects lost for a long time time reappeared where they had been most sought after, and they crept into a turbulent fleeing behind the magic needles of Melquíades. „Things have a life of their own,“ proclaimed the gypsy in a harsh tone „it is only a matter of awakening the soul.“

The author:

Aracataca, Colombia, 1927 – Mexico City 2014. Nobel Prize in 1982, he had the consecration of the great international public with Cent’anni di solitudine (1967). Among his works: Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Announced (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in his Labyrinth (1989), Love and Other Demons (1994).

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