by Patricia Bochi

This October, we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Originally published in Spanish as Cien años de soledad, in 1967, and since then translated into thirty-seven languages, the book has been awarded Italy’s Chianciano Award, France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Venezuela’s Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and the Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered to be the Columbian author’s finest work, and its success contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1982. The work exemplifies the Magical Realist literary movement, in both style and theme, which was popular during the so-called Latin American Boom years of the 1960s and 1970s. In Magical Realism, the supernatural is treated as mundane, and vice versa.

Synopsis

“One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family.” –

Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (February 21, 2006)

Reviews

“You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire . . . With a single bound, Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either. Dazzling.” (The New York Times)

“García Márquez forces upon us at every page the wonder and extravagance of life, while compassionately mocking its effusions; and when the book ends . . . we are left with that pleasant exhaustion which only very great novels provide . . . [García Márquez] makes us feel as if we had survived his century of articulate dreams only to awaken and discover that they must finally all come true.” (The New York Review of Books)

“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. Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life.” (William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review)

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