One Hundred Years of Solitude

García Márquez’s breakthrough is one of those novels in which the opening line sets the precedent for the entire work - ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ Memory, family, war, childhood, discovery, and a disjointed timeframe all feature in this first line and seep through the rest of the novel. Set in the fictional Colombian village of Macondo, this is the story of the Buendía family, from the founding of the village to its ultimate destruction; a story in which very little makes sense and in which fantasy and reality merge into hazy similarity. Tragic and comic, this novel both laughs in the face of European concern with scientific facts and paints a portrait of a crazed, fervent and pulsating Colombia, with gypsy adventures, madness, insomnia, catastrophic wars, and incest all haunting the seven generations of the Buendía family.

A novel that resists all generalisations, the hugely influential and startlingly original One Hundred Years of Solitude helped launch ‘Magical Realism’ and a whole generation of Latin American writers on the international scene.