One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Free Book Summary
Introduction to One Hundred Years of Solitude This novel by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez was first published in Spanish in 1967. Named in English One Hundred Years of Solitude, it was a phenomenal success worldwide. The novel chronicles the history of the fictional town Macondo through the life of one a family and it spans over… well, you’d think one hundred years during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but with Garcia Marques, time is not that simple. "Hey Ruth, Gracias for the Garcia Marquez free summary!" One Hundred Years of Solitude – Executive Summary The novel tell the story of the Buendia family and the fictional town Macondo throughout about one hundred years during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The principal characters are Jose Arcadio Buendia, the family’s patriarch, and his wife Ursula Buendia, and Melquiades, a gypsy magician and philosopher. With them, the story is full of other characters, among them the Buendia children, grandchildren, and great grand children. Prologue: Though they were cousins, Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendia courted and finally dared to marry. Ursula, believing the whispers that such a union would result in the birth of offspring with pig’s tails, would not let Jose Arcadio consummate the marriage. Frustrated, and angered by the teasing he received concerning his wife’s intransigence, one day while at a cock fight, he killed a townsman named Prudencio Aguilar. Jose then returned to Ursula and announced that they would now begin to have normal marital relations. After a while of being haunted by the ghost of Prudencio, he decided they would have to leave the area. Together with other settlers, Jose and Ursula “crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea.” After twenty six months, they gave up the expedition and founded the out-of-the-way hamlet of Macondo on the banks of the shallow tropical river embedded with “smooth, white, prehistoric stones.” History was, once again, about to be born. Every spring a band of gypsies visited the quite village of Macondo. Melquiades, their Chief, became a very good friend to Jose Arcadio, the town leader. The gypsies always brought an assortment of telescopes and other “scientific toys” with them along with their flying carpets and magic spells. They used them to entice and entertain the community whose solitude was not only physical, but cultural as well. Ice, a camera, and a Pianola were followed many years later by automobiles and factories. Jose Arcadio was even more captivated by Melquiades’ beguiling Sanskrit writings. Nearly a century afterwards, his great grandson was also lured by the gypsy writings; he finally devoted his whole life to deciphering them. One year, the gypsy band returned to Macondo minus their clan leader – Melquiades had died. In honor of his departed friend, Jose Arcadio built a laboratory next to his house. When the first Buendia son, Jose Arcadio II, was born without the curse of a pig’s tail, Ursula was relieved. He grew to be an immensely strong young man, and his mother went on to bear a second son, Aureliano. This free book summary of One Hundred Years of Solitude is complimentary from the www.free-book-summary.com website. Want to say Thanks? Tell about the book summary to your friends, link to it from your blog, or include a link to it in a forum. Cheers! Much later, Jose Arcadio Buendia, now a weathered old man tormented by memories and ghosts, went insane, barking in a strange tongue and “giving off a green froth at the mouth.” Aided by twenty men, Ursula had him dragged to a chestnut tree and securely bound. There he remained, month after month, fettered to the tree, until he joined Melquiades and Prudencio Aguliar in death. (A few more experts are recapitulated here from the elaborately seductive chronicles of Macondo’s appointed ten decades. Each highlights one of the main characters; and together with many other intertwining stories, they all blend in a slow arabesque that finally circles back to the book’s beginning, as Macondo spirals towards its inevitable self destruction.) Pilar Ternera, a fortune teller, “fat, talkative, with airs of a matron in disgrace,” became fond of the oversized Jose II, whom she lured into the granary night after night. They exuberant lovers … and they even came to suspect that love could be deeper and more vibrant than the wild but momentary passions displayed during their secret life. Then Pilar announced that Jose II was going to be a father. She bore him a healthy son; but soon, torn by the calls of the outside world, Jose II left his mistress. Pilar later gave birth to still another son, fathered by Aureliano, Jose II’s brother. After Melquiades, the gypsy, returned from death to rescue Macondo from the plague of amnesia (the towns people had desperately compensated for their memory loss by making labels for every article in the village), he once again dies – only to re-emerge as a ghost. He continued to use both magic and science as he helped guide Macondo out of its innocence toward “progress” – and at the same time to wrap it deeper in the isolation parochial myth and sorcery. Aureliano, the second Buendia son, seeing the Civil War was imminent, proclaimed himself a Colonel and formed a small militia. In the years that followed, he “organized thirty two uprisings, and he lost them all.” Despite his ineptness, he somehow survived countless attempts at assignation and execution to achieve honor and fame as a great heroic liberator. When Colonel Buendia’s nephew Aureliano Jose was gunned down at a theatrical performance by a Captain Aquiles Ricardo, the vengeance of the Colonel was swift and terrible. “Long live the Liberal party! Long live Colonel Aureliano Buendia!” shouted his loyal followers. Later that same night, they filed past and mutilated the Captain’s freshly slain corpse. “A patrol had to use a wheel barrel to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water soaked loaf of bread.” At last the legendary but aging Colonel Aureliano Buendia was forced to give up any further exploits, spending his remaining days in a stupor, fashioning little wooded fishes in his workshop. Along the way, he had father seventeen bastard sons – all bearing the name “Aureliano” – by seventeen different women. Each birth was duly recorded in a family ledger by his grandmother, Ursula. “Meme” (Renata Remedios) spurned the warnings of her withered great-grandmother to break off her affair with Mauricio Babilona, a local mechanic who was constantly surrounded by clouds of yellow butterflies. Fernanda, the girl’s prudish mother, however, did more than issue warnings; she sensed the source of the insects she found hovering each morning throughout her home. Reporting that “hens were being stolen,” Fernanda convinced the Mayor to station an armed guard in the backyard. That night, the guard brought down Mauricio Babilonia as he was lifting up the tiles to get into the bathroom where Meme was waiting for him, naked and trembling with love among the scorpions and butterflies …A bullet lodged in his spinal column reduced him to his bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest …tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies … and ostracized as a chicken thief. This free book summary of One Hundred Years of Solitude is complimentary from the www.free-book-summary.com website. Want to say Thanks? Tell about the book summary to your friends, link to it from your blog, or include a link to it in a forum. Cheers! Meme was shuttled off to a convent and no one in Macondo heard from her again; but her son Aureliano, was later sent to Macondo to be raised in the Buendia household. Fernanda, ashamed of the truth, always insisted that she had found the child “floating in a basket.” Jose Arcadio Segundo became involved in a strike against Macondo’s Yankee-owned banana processing factory. The Army that was called in to break up the strike, fired on the crowd. When Jose Arcadio came into the darkness, he realized that he was aboard a silent train in the midst of the riddled corpses of three thousand men, women, and children. Managing to push himself off the train, he limps back to his village. No one would believe him when he tried to convince the people that the brutal massacre had indeed happened. “Always remember,” he pronounced to his kin, “they were more than three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea.” Now it seemed as though a curse was brought upon the town. For five years straight, it rained, leaving Macondo in ruins. During the rains, Ursula, the founding mother who was by now a centenarian, had finally died. After this, Jose Arcadio II shut himself up in the room in which Malquiades had once lived, in an effort to decipher the strange parchments the gypsies had left behind – the pages that contained the Buendia history and forewarnings of their ultimate end. Epilogue: Though the Buendias were a robust, dynamic family, their fate had been spelled out from the day of the incestuous marriage a century earlier. Now Meme’s Aureliano – ignoring his great-great grandmother’s century old superstition, in true, Buendia fashion – took his own aunt Amaranta Ursula as his mistress. Alas, the prophecy proved to be more than simple myth when Amaranta Ursula gave birth to little Aureliano, a boy perfect in every way – except for the tiny curl of a tail that protruded from the base of his spine. That night, “Melquiades’ final keys were revealed” to the infant’s father, “and he saw that epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space.” It said, “the first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.” The accursed infant Aureliano was indeed at the moment being assaulted and carried off by a colony of ants, thus ending the Buendia’s reign in Macondo. One hundred years of refusing to acknowledge the world outside of their village had destroyed them; and “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on Earth.” "Hi Ruth, I enjoyed the free summary so much. Many Thanks!" One Hundred Years of Solitude is like stepping into a trance, where the past, present, and future seem to merge. A dream-like cadence of words combined with a wonderfully readable script that explores all the poles of life; births and deaths, marriages, and executions, selflessness and suicide, solidarity and solitude, passion and pathos, love and bitter loneliness. During a century of life in the village of Macondo, angels appear. A beautiful virgin ascends to heaven majestically veiled in bed linen, gypsy ghosts stalked the Buendia library, and a family corpse arrives in the mail, even while family liberals battle conservatives in civil wars and North American capitalists carve out a banana empire in the jungle. Flying carpets dodged under telegraph wires, the new-fangled ice-box amazes Macondo’s isolated citizenry, and countless legitimate and illegitimate Buendia offspring are christened after their aunt, uncles, parents, and grandparents, intensifying the circular surreal structure of the novel. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a book to be read casually – nor is it meant to be “studied.” It is, more than anything, a pilgrimage into the mythic panorama of South American history, and into all the universal dimensions of human experience. The Complete Book Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper and Row, New York, NY, 1970).
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