Сто лет одиночества: История семьи Буэндиа и города Макондо

1967 novel by Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude (lang es, ) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature. The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant Garde) literary movement. Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in world literature.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of Macondo. The founders of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, leave their hometown in Riohacha, Colombia, after José Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting José Arcadio was impotent. One night of their emigration journey, while camping on a riverbank, José 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.

A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. "The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history", writes Daniel Erickson. "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions." The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. "Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create." The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for Macondo's location, but also a symbol of its fate. Higgins writes, "By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history." In this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive that narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. Melquíades, the keeper of the archive, represents both the whimsical and the literary.

As a metaphoric, critical interpretation of Colombian history, from foundation to contemporary nation, One Hundred Years of Solitude presents different national myths through the story of the Buendía family, One Hundred Years of Solitude differs from this tendency by including the traveling Roma throughout the story. Led by a man named Melquíades, the Roma bring new discoveries and technology to the isolated village of Macondo, often inciting the curiosity of José Arcadio Buendía.

The Thousand Days War in Colombia was fought between Liberals and Conservatives from 1899 to 1902. The Conservatives had been "in control more or less constantly since 1867," and the Liberals, mainly coffee plantation owners and workers who had been excluded from representation, sparked a revolution in October 1899. The fighting continued for a few years, and it is estimated that over 130,000 lives were lost. In Chapters 5 and 6 of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Conservative Army has invaded the town of Macondo leading Aureliano to eventually lead a rebellion. The rebellion is successful the Conservative Army falls  and afterward, Aureliano, now 'Colonel Aureliano Buendía' decides to continue fighting. He departs Macondo with the band of people who helped him oust the Conservative Army to go continue fighting elsewhere for the Liberal side. Because Macondo is a fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez, the exact events of the Thousand Days' War as they occurred in the book are fictional. However, these events are widely considered to be metaphorical for the Thousand Days War as experienced by the entire country of Colombia.

The “Banana Massacre” occurred December 5 6, 1928, in Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. Banana plantation workers had been striking against the United Fruit Company to earn better labor conditions when members of the local military fired guns into crowds. This event, which occurs in Chapter 15 of One Hundred Years of Solitude, was depicted with relative accuracy, minus a false sense of certainty about the specific facts surrounding the events. For instance, although Garcia Márquez writes that there must have been “three thousand dead,” the true number of victims is unknown. However, the number likely was not far off, because it is considered that the “number of killings was over a thousand,” according to Dr. Jorge Enrique Elias Caro and Dr. Antonino Vidal Ortega. On October 21, 2022, Netflix commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the announcement of García Márquez's Nobel Prize in Literature with an exclusive preview of One Hundred Years of Solitude. On the tenth anniversary of García Márquez's passing, Netflix released the official teaser for One Hundred Years of Solitude and revealed that the series will run for sixteen episodes. The cast includes Claudio Cataño (Colonel Aureliano Buendía), Jerónimo Barón (young Aureliano Buendía), Marco González (Jose Arcadio Buendía), Leonardo Soto (José Arcadio), Susana Morales (Úrsula Iguarán), Ella Becerra (Petronila Iguarán), Carlos Suaréz (Aureliano Iguarán), Moreno Borja (Melquiades), and Santiago Vásquez (teenage Aureliano Buendía). Even though One Hundred Years of Solitude is his most famous work, García Márquez himself refused to sell the screen rights to his novel because he did not want it to be adapted in any language other than Spanish and felt a film adaptation would not cover the entire plot due to its length. For the upcoming TV adaptation, Netflix worked with Rodrigo and Gonzalo García who served as the show's executive producers. The episodes were all shot in the late writer's native Colombia and directed by Alex García Lopez, and all the characters' lines are spoken in Spanish. Barbara Enriquez, who had previously worked on Netflix's Roma, served as the show's production designer. One Hundred Years of Solitude is Netflix's most expensive Latin American made project to date, with Colombian groups and indigenous communities making and providing props, and a total of four hundred fifty locals building three different versions of Macondo for the progression of the series.