One Hundred Years of Solitude

Úrsula is the matriarch who tries, for some time at least, to hold the Buendías together. How do the other female characters in One Hundred Years Of Solitude fare in a contemporary reading?

“One Hundred Years Of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book Of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race” – William Kennedy, New York Times. Why do you think One Hundred Years Of Solitude has become a classic?

“The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years Of Solitude… was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness… I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face” – Gabriel García Márquez, The Paris Review. How would you describe the ‘storytelling’ voice in One Hundred Years Of Solitude?

In One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Remedios the Beauty floats up into the sky when pegging out the sheets; the trickle of José Arcadio’s blood moves through Macondo to reach his mother, Úrsula, in her kitchen. One Hundred Years Of Solitude is one of the first translated and celebrated texts to use magical realism. What do you understand by this term? What wonders does it perform in this novel? How have these moments affected your reading experience?

“It amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination” – García Márquez, The Paris Review. How does García Márquez write the history of Colombia in One Hundred Years Of Solitude?

What effect does the refrain “Many years later” have on your reading experience? What purpose do you think it serves?

What role does Melquíades, his discoveries, his resurrection, and his parchments play in the novel?

In the first pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude, we are given a family tree of names and the words: “The world was so recent that many things lacked names.” What significance do names and naming have in the book?

Macondo suffers an ‘insomnia plague’ at the beginning of the novel. What significance does loss of memory (personal and collective) and the loss of our connection to the past have in the novel? 10.“Colonel Aureliano Buendía could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude.” Many characters mention ‘solitude’ – how do you interpret the word in the novel?