Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran found the town of Macondo in a remote corner of Colombia, a place so new that many things have no names yet. Over a century the town grows from an isolated village into a place touched by gypsy inventors, civil wars, a banana company and a railway, and the Buendia family's fortunes rise and fall with it.
The family repeats itself across generations: sons named Jose Arcadio tend to be impulsive and strong, those named Aureliano withdrawn and intense. Colonel Aureliano Buendia leads dozens of failed uprisings; Ursula lives for well over a century holding the house together; a beautiful girl ascends to heaven while folding sheets; an insomnia plague wipes out memory. The extraordinary is narrated in the same calm tone as the everyday.
Garcia Marquez blends Colombian history, including political violence and the 1928 massacre of banana workers, with myth and family legend. Gregory Rabassa's English translation was praised by the author himself. The novel became the defining work of the Latin American Boom and is a key reason Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize in 1982.
Book details
| Author | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
|---|---|
| First published | 1967 |
| Original language | Spanish |
| Translated by | Gregory Rabassa |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 417 |
| Setting | Macondo, a fictional town in Colombia, over roughly a century |
| Awards | Romulo Gallegos Prize 1972 |
Themes
- Solitude
- Cyclical time
- Family
- Memory
- Colonialism and history
Who should read it
Readers ready for a dense, dreamlike family saga that changed world literature.