One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967 by Gabriel García Márquez, tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía family in the imaginary town of Macondo, lost between the jungle and a river, from its birth to its disappearance. The book became a symbol of so-called magical realism, a style in which the extraordinary is told as if it were ordinary.

So a priest levitates after drinking hot chocolate, a young woman rises into the sky while folding sheets, yellow butterflies follow a man in love, and the narrator neither explains nor is surprised. The author said he wrote with the same straight face his grandmother used to tell absurd stories.

The result is a family saga that also speaks about the history of Latin America: civil wars, the arrival of foreign companies, official forgetting. Even memory becomes a character.

José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán are cousins and marry, even though they were warned that close relatives can have children with a pig's tail, as had happened in a neighboring family. Úrsula, terrified, refuses intimacy for months, until a neighbor, Prudencio Aguilar, mocks José Arcadio after a cockfight.

Furious, José Arcadio kills the man with a spear. But the dead man begins to appear in their house, washing his wound, and the couple cannot bear the guilt. They leave the village with some friends and, after months of walking, José Arcadio dreams of a city of mirrors and founds Macondo on the bank of a river.

Already at the origin are two marks of the book: the fear of punishment for a forbidden union and the guilt over a crime that will not fade. They return, in other forms, generation after generation.

Macondo is so isolated that Melquíades's gypsies show up every year with inventions that look like magic: magnets that drag pots along, giant magnifying glasses, and, greatest of all, ice, which José Arcadio treats as if it were a diamond. He falls in love with the inventions and spends the family's money on alchemy experiments.

Obsessed, he spends his nights trying to find a route to the outside world and ends up going mad. The family ties him to a chestnut tree in the yard, where he stays for years, speaking Latin. He dies under a rain of yellow flowers that covers the streets.

The scene speaks of curiosity and failure: the fascination with novelty that scorns what is right next to you. Think of someone who gets dazzled by the latest gadget and doesn't notice their own house falling apart.