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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
fiction
History runs in circles, and solitude is the family inheritance.
About the book
First published in Spanish in 1967 and translated into English by Gregory Rabassa, it follows seven generations of the Buendía family through the founding, rise, and decline of the town they build. It is the best known work of magical realism, where the marvelous and the ordinary sit side by side, and it is often named among the most important novels ever written.
About the author
Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
Key ideas
- History runs in circles. The Buendías repeat the same names, mistakes, and obsessions across seven generations.
- Solitude is the family inheritance. Each character is sealed inside a private world the others cannot reach.
- Magical realism treats the miraculous and the ordinary as equal, so wonder and grief land with the same weight.
- Memory and forgetting decide a town's fate as much as any war or fortune.