One Hundred Years of Solitude
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."--incipit to One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez |
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One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967), by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel that narrates the multi-generational story of the Buendía Family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia. The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames, a technique derived from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (as in The Garden of Forking Paths).
The widely acclaimed story, considered to be the author's masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and succeeded so well that it has been translated into thirty-seven languages and sold more than 20 million copies. 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, that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.
Critiques
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have both received occasional criticisms. Stylistically, Harold Bloom remarked that "My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb... There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it." Additionally, David Haberly alleges that Marquez may have borrowed themes from several works, such as William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and Chateaubriand’s Atala." Lastly, some critics have also speculated the potential of Marquez harboring ideals of marianismo, adhering to sexist stereotypes, and reinforcing these patriarchica stereotypes and sexist attitudes in One Hundred Years of Solitude through his portrayal of female characters as domestic housewives. For instance, Irvin D.S. Winsboro has argued that, "One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the traditional Latin American role of women as adjuncts to men and implies neither qualitative awareness nor literary criticism of the restrictive political and economic systems and notions that perpetuate such notions. As a whole, the women of Macondo are pictured as male-defined, biological reproducers or sexually pleasing objects who are treated thematically as accessories to the men who actually shape and control the world."
