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Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928, in the small town of Aracataca, Colombia. He started his career as a journalist, first publishing his short stories and novels in the mid-1950s. When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in his native Spanish in 1967, as Cien años de soledad, García Márquez achieved true international fame; he went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Still a prolific writer of fiction and journalism, García Márquez was perhaps the central figure in the so-called Latin Boom, which designates the rise in popularity of Latin-American writing in the 1960s and 1970s. One Hundred Years of Solitude is perhaps the most important, and the most widely read, text to emerge from that period. It is also a central and pioneering work in the movement that has become known as magical realism, which was characterized by the dreamlike and fantastic elements woven into the fabric of its fiction.
In part, the magic of García Márquez’s writing is a result of his rendering the world through a child’s eyes: he has said that nothing really important has happened to him since he was eight years old and that the atmosphere of his books is the atmosphere of childhood. García Márquez’s native town of Aracataca is the inspiration for much of his fiction, and readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude may recognize many parallels between the real-life history of García Márquez’s hometown and the history of the fictional town of Macondo. In both towns, foreign fruit companies brought many prosperous plantations to nearby locations at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the time of García Márquez’s birth, however, Aracataca had begun a long, slow decline into poverty and obscurity, a decline mirrored by the fall of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Even as it draws from García Márquez’s provincial experiences, One Hundred Years of Solitude also reflects political ideas that apply to Latin America as a whole. Latin America once had a thriving population of native Aztecs and Incas, but, slowly, as European explorers arrived, the native population had to adjust to the technology and capitalism that the outsiders brought with them. Similarly, Macondo begins as a very simple settlement, and money and technology become common only when people from the outside world begin to arrive. In addition to mirroring this early virginal stage of Latin America’s growth, One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the current political status of various Latin American countries. Just as Macondo undergoes frequent changes in government, Latin American nations, too, seem unable to produce governments that are both stable and organized. The various dictatorships that come into power throughout the course of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, mirror dictatorships that have ruled in Nicaragua, Panama, and Cuba. García Márquez’s real-life political leanings are decidedly revolutionary, even communist: he is a friend of Fidel Castro. But his depictions of cruel dictatorships show that his communist sympathies do not extend to the cruel governments that Communism sometimes produces.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, then, is partly an attempt to render the reality of García Márquez’s own experiences in a fictional narrative. Its importance, however, can also be traced back to the way it appeals to broader spheres of experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude is an extremely ambitious novel. To a certain extent, in its sketching of the histories of civil war, plantations, and labor unrest, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells a story about Colombian history and, even more broadly, about Latin America’s struggles with colonialism and with its own emergence into modernity. García Márquez’s masterpiece, however, appeals not just to Latin American experiences, but to larger questions about human nature. It is, in the end, a novel as much about specific social and historical circumstances—disguised by fiction and fantasy—as about the possibility of love and the sadness of alienation and solitude.
