One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

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• Buendía Family: The family that founds Macondo and that the novel centers on.
• Úrsula Iguarán: José Arcadio Buendía's wife is the matriarch of the family, as well as the member who lives through the most generations. She is the pillar of the house in this novel, and with her demise, eventually the Buendia house falls apart.
• José Arcadio Buendía: The patriarch of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía is strong-willed, immovable by others (both physically and mentally), but has a deep interest in philosophical mysteries.
• José Arcadio: José Arcadio Buendía's firstborn son, who is the first of many colorful Arcadio's who will come to pass.
• Colonel Aureliano Buendía: José Arcadio Buendía's second son and the first person to be born in Macondo, he was named after an earlier ancestor.
• Remedios Moscote: The youngest daughter of the town's Conservative administrator, Don Apolinar Moscote
• Amaranta: The third child of José Arcadio Buendía; she falls in love with the handsome Italian Pietro Crespi, for whom she fights with her sister Rebeca most savagely.
• Rebeca: The orphaned daughter of Ursula Iguaran's second cousins, from Manaure, the capital of La Guajira. Rebeca carries the bones of her dead parents in a burlap sack.
• Arcadio: José Arcadio's illegitimate son by Pilar Ternera
• Aureliano José: The son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, also by Pilar Ternera
• Santa Sofía de la Piedad: The mother of Jose Arcadio Segundo, Aureliano Segundo, and Remedios the Beauty, and the common-law widow of Arcadio. Strange and solitary.
• 17 Aurelianos: Colonel Aureliano Buendía's seventeen illegitimate sons.
• Remedios the Beauty: Arcadio and Santa Sofía's first child. She is the most beautiful woman throughout the history of Macondo and her beauty makes man die.
• José Arcadio Segundo: The twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, the children of Arcadio and Santa Sofía. He is the only one in town who remembers the Banana Company Massacre...
• Aureliano Segundo: The son of Arcadio and Santa Sofia de la Piedad; twin brother of Jose Arcadio Segundo. Very boisterous and impulsive.
• Fernanda del Carpio: The wife of Aureliano Segundo; mother of Renata Remedios, Jose Arcadio II and Amaranta Ursula. She is the last descendent of an impoverished royal family line from a gloomy, dying town.
• Renata Remedios (Meme): The eldest daughter of Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda del Carpio. Fearful of her mother's wrath, she practices the hated clavichord with great intensity; she is really a modern free spirit who loves parties and social gatherings.
• José Arcadio (II): The son of Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda del Carpio. When he is born, Ursula wishes him to be a priest and, eventually, the Pope.
• Amaranta Úrsula: The youngest child of Fernanda and Aureliano, Amaranta inherits the personality traits of Ursula, and shares some of Remedios' beauty.
• Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II): The illegitimate son of Renata Remedios and Mauricio Babilonia. He is treated like a second-class citizen by Fernanda and Jose Arcadio II and neglected throughout most of his childhood.
• Aureliano (III): The child of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula, who dies as an infant.
• Melquíades: The leader of some of the first gypsies to ever set foot in Macondo. He brings with him magical and wondrous new inventions each time he visits, and had a huge influence on Jose Arcadio Buendia during the beginnings of Macondo.
• Pilar Ternera: When she is still young, she takes many young men to her bed; as the novel progresses she becomes the enormous matron of a brothel. She reads fortunes and cards that are often correct although few people heed her advice. She is the mother of both Aureliano Jose (by Aureliano) and Arcadio (by Jose Arcadio)
• Pietro Crespi: A very handsome and polite Italian musician who falls in love with Rebeca.
• Petra Cotes: Aureliano Segundo's devoted mistress. Their partnership has incredible power; she is patient and loving with Aureliano Segundo in the face of many humiliations, and smartly entrepreneurial in the face of financial hardships.
• Mr. Herbert and Mr. Brown: Heads of the Banana Company; caused the Banana massacre in the fictional town of Macondo.
• Mauricio Babilonia: A mechanic at the banana plantation. Dignified, handsome, and patient despite his lowly status, he courts Meme Buendia.
• Gastón: an aviator and an adventurer
• Gerineldo Marquez: Colonel Aureliano Buendia's closest friend. They were loyal compatriots throughout the civil wars and he continues to play an important role in Colonel Aureliano Buendia's life afterwards.
• Don Apolinar Moscote: An amiable, ineffectual government official with seven daughters, including Remedios Moscote. He is a Conservative and is the first one to introduce Colonel Aureliano Buendia to the corruption and hypocrisy of politics.
• Prudencio Aguilar: Before Jose Arcadio Buendia founded Macondo, he killed this man, a cockfighter who insulted him. After Aguilar's death, Jose Arcadio Buendia was filled with grief and remorse, so he packed up and, with some willing young families, moved into the swamp. They became the first people to live in Macondo. Later in his life, Jose Arcadio Buendia and even Ursula are visited by the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar.
• Aureliano Triste: One of the 17 sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, born while he was at the war.
• José Raquel Moncada: The smart, humane, and well-loved Conservative mayor of Macondo during the period of the civil wars. He is a good friend of Colonel Aureliano Buendia and the Buendia family in general, especially Ursula. When Colonel Aureliano Buendia orders his execution, Ursula recognizes that her son is lost to the world.
• Antonio Isabel: A history of a fictional family in 100 years of their timeline in an isolated South American town.
• Father Nicanor: The first priest to come to Macondo. He was the one to build the first church there.
• Roque Carnicero: Add a description of this character.
• Amparo Moscote: Aurelio Buendia's father in law
• Patricia Brown: Yankee daughter of the banana company owner
• Visitación: The Buendia family's Indian servant. She arrived in Macondo with her brother fleeing from the Insomnia Plague, and was hired by Ursula to help with the children and clean the house.
• Alfonso: Friend of Aureliano Babilonia.
• Joseph
• Aureliano Amador
• Aquiles Ricardo
• Don Fernando
• Nigromanta

Quotes edit see section history

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• “The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.”

  Colonel Aureliano Buendia

• “O Coronel Aureliano Buendía mandou dizer, palavra por palavra, que esperava com verdadeira ansiedade aquela tardia mas merecida ocasião de lhe dar um tiro, não para cobrar as arbitrariedades e anacronismos de seu regime, mas por faltar com o respeito a um velho que não fazia mal a ninguém. Foi tal a veemência com que pronunciou a ameaça, que o Presidente da República cancelou a viagem na última hora.”

  Coronel Aureliano Buendía offering his host's courtesy to the President.

• “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.”

  This quote occurs just after the arrival of the railroad, when dozens of new inventions—the phonograph, the telephone, the electric lightbulb—have flooded Macondo.

• “Cease, cows, life is short.”

• “La vejez, no es mas que un pacto honrado con la soledad.”

• “-Compadre, recuerda que a usted no lo fusilo yo, lo fusila la revolución. - Con todo respeto, vaya a comer mierda.”

• “En cualquier lugar que estuvieran, recordaran siempre que el pasado era mentira, que la memoria no tenía caminos de regreso, que toda primavera antigua era irrecuperable, y que el amor más desatinado y tenaz era de todos modos una verdad efímera”

• “Apartense vacas que la vida es corta.”

• “Era lo último que iba quedando de un pasado cuyo aniquilamiento no se consumaba, porque seguía aniquilándose indefinidamente, consumiéndose dentro de sí mismo, acabándose a cada minuto pero sin acabar de acabarse jamás.”

• “En Macondo no ha pasado nada, ni está pasando ni pasará nunca. Este es un pueblo feliz.”

• “Things have a life of their own. It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.”

  Gypsy

• “"It's the smell of the devil," she said. "Not at all," Melquiades corrected her. "It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate."”

  Melquion

• “The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”

• “Then he gave himself over to that hand, and in a terrible state of exhaustion he let himself be led to a shapeless place where his clothes were taken off and he was heaved about like a sack of potatoes and thrown from one side to the other in a bottomless darkness in which his arms were useless, where it no longer smelled of woman but of ammonia, and where he tried to remember her face and found before him the face of Ursula, confusedly aware that he was doing something that for a very long time he had wanted to do but that he had imagined could really never be done, not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his feet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the air of his intestines, and fear, and the bewildered anxiety to flee and at the same time stay forever in that exasperated silence and that fearful solitude.”

• “Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother's experiences of something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanisms of love, he interrupted him to ask: "What does it feel like?" Jose Arcadio gave an immediate reply: "It's like an earthquake."”

• “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”

• “The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning or end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever.”

• “Look at the mess we've gotten ourselves into, just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.”

  Colonel Aureliano Buendia

• “He saw a bear dressed like a Dutch girl keeping time to the music with a soup spoon and a pan.”

• “The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness. It pained her not to have had that revelation many years before when it had still been possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light and evoke without trembling Pietro Crespi's smell of lavender at dusk and rescue Rebeca from her slough of misery, not out of hatred or out of love but because of the measureless understanding of solitude.”

• “He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear.”

• “He became accustomed to the sound of the rain, which after two months had become another form of silence...”

• “Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that Jose Arcadio Buendia was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.”

• “...a man whose tremendous power demanded a movement of seismic readjustment from her insides.”

• “...literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people..”

• “Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Macondo
• Catarino
• Riohacha
• Brussels
• Rome
• Caribbean
• Francisco
• Providence

Organizations edit see section history

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• The banana Company: The Banana Company came to Macondo after a yankee named Mr. Brown visits the city.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Term: Sed varius placerat enim, et tempor neque mollis non. Praesent elementum odio vitae mauris rhoncus gravida. Quisque non orci nisl. Nam enim massa, lacinia a hendrerit non, euismod in orci?

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Magical Realism: Describe this theme.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Tuesdays With Morrie, and followed by Of Mice and Men.

Preceded by The Diary of a Young Girl, and followed by Tuesdays With Morrie.

Preceded by The Ambassadors, and followed by The Great Gatsby.

Preceded by The Da Vinci Code, and followed by A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Preceded by To Kill a Mockingbird, and followed by The Grapes of Wrath.

Preceded by Heart of Darkness, and followed by Snow Country.

Preceded by The Story of Tracy Beaker, and followed by The Pillars of the Earth.

Preceded by The Cubs and Other Stories, and followed by The Master and Margarita.

Preceded by Cry, the Beloved Country, and followed by The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Preceded by Little Women, and followed by The Chronicles of Narnia.

Preceded by Belle Du Seigneur, and followed by The Sound and the Fury.

Preceded by The Fellowship of the Ring, and followed by The Return of the King.

Preceded by Gone With the Wind, and followed by The Great Gatsby.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Gabriel García Márquez (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Bahman Farzaneh (Translator)
2. Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (1969: Novel)
• Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1972)
• Premio Rómulo Gallegos (1972)
• Nobel Prize (1982: Author)
• BBC's Big Read (April 2003, #32)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 863.64

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( G ) › Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › Latin American
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics › Latin American
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Libreria Norma: Venta de libros

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Cien años de perdón (IMDb)

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