One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez begins One Hundred Years of Solitude at the moment of its ending and ends at the moment of its beginning, and in that circular structure contains the entire cosmology of a fictional world so fully realized it has permanently enlarged the possibilities of the novel as a form. Published in Spanish in 1967 and translated into English in 1970, it is the foundational text of magical realism-though that term, as with all genre labels, does less justice to the book than harm.

The novel follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, from its founding in a jungle to its apocalyptic destruction. The patriarch José Arcadio Buendía arrives with his cousin-wife Úrsula, fleeing the ghost of a man he has killed, and builds a town that will grow, flourish, be occupied by foreign banana companies, destroyed by wars, and finally obliterated, as was always promised. What García Márquez does with this multigenerational chronicle is fuse the mythological with the historical and the domestic with the cosmic, producing a narrative in which the miraculous is reported with the same matter-of-fact precision as the mundane.

The tone is the discovery of the book: cheerful, energetic, almost pastoral, and yet somehow accommodating of immense sadness. When a character dies or is abandoned or simply becomes incapable of love, García Márquez describes it with the same buoyant lucidity he uses for the most fantastical events, and this equivalence-between magic and grief, between wonder and tragedy-creates an effect that no other novelist has quite replicated.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel that asks to be read as if for the first time always, discovering the world fresh in each sentence. It is, by almost any reckoning, one of the handful of greatest novels written in the twentieth century.