Let's see what I can say that hasn't already been said about One Hundred Years of Solitude, the quintessential Latin American novel. It had always been recommended to me but a couple of months ago I decided to read it. Well, in case anyone is late like me, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel that surely ended up winning the Nobel Prize for literature for Gabriel García Márquez. In short, it tells the story of the Buendia family and their "curse or defect" attributed to loneliness for seven generations.
Perhaps this story became so well known apart from its dozens of characters full of nuances and unique personality although in a certain way we see the traits of inheritance and what we could call an eternal family return, but apart from all this One Hundred Years of Solitude dares to tell the story of all Latin America and the Caribbean through the events that occur in a small town at the end of the world called Macondo. Magical realism is also another of the elements for which the novel is well remembered, being this his masterpiece. Magical realism, beyond what some people outside the mainstream may think, is not random and fantastic events that are used to advance the plot, but rather a reflection of a reality told in a fantastical way, but which are based on the inevitability of the real world, but told in an idyllic and symbolic way.
It is likely that my previous knowledge of the history and culture of the new continent allowed the reading of the work not to become as dense as many people claim in their first approach to it. On the contrary, I ended up very hooked on the misfortune of the Buendias and how they tried to overcome a destiny that seemed inevitable, always loaded with what the narrator called loneliness, but which more than that was the representation of misfortunes self-imposed by the characters themselves to try to overcome the obstacles that life was putting in their way little by little.
The decadence and rather the very essence of humanity is reflected through the town, which is nothing more than the bonds formed by the characters. Betrayals, conflicts, adventures, misadventures and above all love and curiosity, as driving forces of the greatest feats in human life that through a forgotten Macondo Marquéz manages to reflect why "the lineages condemned to a hundred years of solitude do not have a second chance on earth."
