One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad)
GABRIE GARCIA MARQUEZ
1982 Nobel Prize in Literature
Issued by the Venezuelan government through the offices of the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies (Celarg), 1972
The 1969 Prix du Meilleur Livre etranger (Best Foreign Book Award) is a French literary award created.
The first edition was published by Sander in 1974.
It is one of the works that cause the most contradictory evaluations and reader feelings in the world of literature, that is, you either fall in love or hate what they say. Most of those who stopped reading in the first 20 pages talk about the incest element and the gloomy perception of reality in the story, the repetitive similar stories of various generations of characters with the same names, etc. I think the source of all these criticisms is the lack of understanding and concentration, because the story of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a century-old biography of a family in terms of its technical structure, and since it is written in a literary style called "Magical Realism", it approaches this biography from the point of view of the people of that period.
So, let's take a look at what this current called "MAGIC REALITY" is.
Although it owes its fame to Latin American writers, it is a global movement. The German art critic Franz Roh, who first coined it, used this term about the style of rendering that realism in a reality-themed painting, and it became a definition used in various fields of art and showed the actual frequency of use in literature.
This trend should not be confused with works such as "Lord of the Rings", "Game of Thrones" or literary products such as horror novels, fairy tales, myths and legends in which supernatural beings take place.
The stark difference between them is that the author's belief in these supernatural factors is no more than ours. Just as much as we do.
We capture the magical realism better in the stories of our grandfathers, who tell their grandchildren about man-sized wolves descending into the village on winter nights, or our grandmothers, who whispered that old ladysto come on he encountered while returning from the field on a night with a full moon when he was pregnant, called him to the creek in a whisper. Most of the details are foggy in both stories. there is no real evidence that they are the product of fear or that they are real. But most of the time more than one person sees both the wolf and the crone, or the other villagers come across the footprints of the wolf the next day, and the next day a woman has a miscarriage in one of the houses near the place where our grandmother met the crone, or everyone has nightmares or hears the same whisper. Thus, these half-evidences, which we connect to each other not by logic but by fear and intuition, constitute half-realism, that is, the reflection of the movement called "MAGIC REALISTRY" in our lives.
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We secretly believe in these stories, so we don't go hunting for crones with a gun in hand on nights with a full moon, but we still shudder at the thought of going to the field on a night with a full moon when we are in the village. We postpone going to the field that night with various excuses (if possible, to daylight hours:) )
The sentence in the preface of Marrquez's book will give an idea about the weight of this movement in the work.
“When I started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, I wanted to find a way to convey through literature everything that had influenced me as a child. In a very gloomy big house, a sister eating dirt, a foresighted grandmother, and a mass of homonymous relatives with no distinction between happiness and madness. My aim was to artistically leave behind my childhood days among relatives. I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude in less than two years. But it took me fifteen, sixteen years to think about this book before I sat down at my typewriter. My grandmother did the cruelest things, even her hair. He told me without moving, as if it were just what he saw. I realized that what made the stories he told so valuable was his emotionless demeanor and the richness of his images. I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude using my grandmother's method. I've known people. They weren't surprised, because I told them I didn't tell him anything new. You won't find a single sentence in my books that isn't based on reality."
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the centuries-old story of 6 generations of Buendias cursed by magic and a consanguineous marriage, and the town of MACONDO, founded by Colonel buendias. This story tells how the town and its buendias flourish, expand and then fade away, in a language of rich imagination, of strict magical realism, just as the author's grandmother, mentioned in the foreword, could understand and tell.
Colonial worlds that accelerated after the 1700s, increasing in number, and what the inhabitants of these new lands hold on to and what remains in their hands, what the colonists and the natives exchanged in this encounter, how the life of the townspeople, who are months away from the nearest civilization, with the lure of capitalism introduced into them under the guise of banana companies. What happened to the townspeople and the town in the secluded ruins of the companies that changed and took what they wanted and left here, the giant red ants, the buendias who were enraged because they couldn't take a picture of God, the people who lost their memory and did not believe that there was a banana company here once, and deny the evidence, with their memories. "GOD EXISTS!! It tells the mayor who writes, the pig-tailed buendias children, the mysterious and loved and hated Melquides, who has made every buendias inclined to share their occult curiosities since the founding of the town, the rebecca who comes out one day with a sack full of human bones, and dozens of other striking stories. this book.
Among those who intend to read, those who know the working principle of the pump, please apply this to this book. It is a quality literary work, but just like you need to give some water to get water from the pump, if you want to get something from this story, first give some attention and time, you will realize that this story permeates you.
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