Guide to One Hundred Years of Solitude
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One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that took the world by storm. It's a furious, passionate, seething novel filled with hallucinogenic scenery. With his groundbreaking book, Gabriel García Márquez not only established himself as a writer with singular vision, he also established Latin American literature and "magical realism" as forces to be reckoned with. There are many millions of copies in print worldwide, and the readership is so thrilled, the novel has been translated into more than three-dozen languages. Because of the ground he broke with One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature. The first work in Spanish to become, a U.S. bestseller (it was originally published and widely read in Spanish in 1967) this was, in 1970 the book to read. And read it we did—and more than 30 years later, we still do!
Why You Should Read ItRead One Hundred Years of Solitude because of its passion. It's a wildly passionate book that brings to life mythical and colorful characters. In Macondo, wonderful, magical, fantastical, unreal things happen every day. They swirl on a canvas as unique and foreign as any you have known yet they evoke basic human truths that are as real as every day. And through this fantastic town and its fantastic people, you will come to appreciate the magic of your own life.
It's a book where a lot happens, and what happens will move you. You'll find your blood boils and your stomach flips from all the love, compassion, conflict, heartbreak, beauty, stubbornness, despair, humor, simplicity, complexity, intellect and prophecy. One Hundred Years of Solitude will inspire you to connect with your family, love more deeply and dream bigger and find deeper truths within yourself.
The Road to Macondo
Writing teachers will tell you: Write what you know. Gabriel García Márquez did. The author's journey to create Macondo, the fictional town of One Hundred Years of Solitude, began on Saturday, February 19, 1943. He set out, with his mother, to sell their ancestral house in Aracataca, Colombia. It was the house he had been born in. He arrived in town tired from a long journey. He breathed the rarified air and fell in love all over again. The whole town seemed dead and frozen, filled with ghosts and memories. When he recalls the journey, he says of it, "I could not have imagined this simple two-day trip would be so decisive that the longest and most diligent of lives would not be enough for me to finish recounting it." It took this author nearly twenty years and three other novels (none of them autobiographical) to put it down on paper, but the seeds of One Hundred Years of Solitude were sown on this fateful trip.
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