One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of seven generations of the Buend\u00eda Family in the town of Macondo. The founders of Macondo, Jos\u00e9 Arcadio Buend\u00eda and \u00darsula Iguar\u00e1n, leave their hometown after Jos\u00e9 Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting Jos\u00e9 Arcadio was impotent.[15] One night of their emigration journey, while camping on a riverbank, Jos\u00e9 Arcadio dreams of “Macondo”, a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to establish Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the jungle, his founding of Macondo is utopic.[10]<\/p>\n
Jos\u00e9 Arcadio Buend\u00eda believes Macondo to be surrounded by water, and from that island, he invents the world according to his perceptions.[10] Soon after its founding, Macondo became a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events that involve the generations of the Buend\u00eda family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their periodic (mostly self-inflicted) misfortunes. For years the town has been solitary and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of a band of Gypsies, who show the townspeople scientific discoveries such as magnets, telescopes, and ice. The leader of the Gypsies, a man named Melqu\u00edades, maintains a close friendship with Jos\u00e9 Arcadio, who becomes increasingly withdrawn, obsessed with investigating the mysteries of the universe presented to him by the Gypsies. Ultimately, Jos\u00e9 Arcadio is driven insane, speaking only in Latin, and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.<\/p>\n
Eventually Macondo becomes exposed to the outside world and the government of newly independent Colombia. A rigged election between the Conservative and Liberal parties is held in town, inspiring Aureliano Buend\u00eda to join a civil war against the Conservative government. He becomes an iconic revolutionary leader, fighting for many years and surviving multiple attempts on his life, but ultimately tires of war and signs a peace treaty with the Conservatives. Disillusioned, he returns to Macondo and spends the rest of his life making tiny gold fish in his workshop.<\/p>\n
The railroad comes to Macondo, bringing in new technology and many foreign settlers. An American fruit company establishes a banana plantation outside the town, and builds its own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking plantation workers, an incident based on the Banana Massacre of 1928. Jos\u00e9 Arcadio Segundo, the only survivor of the massacre, finds no evidence of the massacre, and the surviving townspeople deny or refuse to believe it happened.<\/p>\n
By the novel’s end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, with the only remaining Buend\u00edas being Amaranta \u00darsula and her nephew Aureliano, whose parentage is hidden by his grandmother Fernanda, and he and Amaranta \u00darsula unknowingly begin an incestuous relationship. They have a child who bears the tail of a pig, fulfilling the lifelong fear of the long-dead matriarch \u00darsula. Amaranta \u00darsula dies in childbirth and the child is devoured by ants, leaving Aureliano as the last member of the family. He decodes an encryption Melqu\u00edades had left behind in a manuscript generations ago. The secret message informs the recipient of every fortune and misfortune that the Buend\u00eda family’s generations lived through. As Aureliano reads the manuscript, he feels a windstorm starting around him, and he reads in the document that the Buend\u00eda family is doomed to be wiped from the face of the Earth because of it. In the last sentence of the book, the narrator describes Aureliano reading this last line just as the entire town of Macondo is scoured from existence.[16]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buend\u00eda family, whose patriarch, Jos\u00e9 Arcadio Buend\u00eda, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":9260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[905,899,940,911],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9259","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-world-literature","7":"product_cat-prose-literature","8":"product_cat-arabic-literature","9":"product_cat-novels","10":"pa_book-author-gabriel-garcia-marquez","12":"first","13":"instock","14":"sale","15":"purchasable","16":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/9259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=9259"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=9259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}