Throughout the novel, several Buendía’s try to decipher the manuscripts written in code in foreign languages that were written by a gypsy, Melquíades, who was a frequenter of the village. It follows José Arcadio Buendía and his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, as they found the town of Macondo as well as the following five generations who live there. He based the fictional setting of his novel, Macondo, on his birthplace of Aracataca, though the location of the novel is never explicitly mentioned in the text. The entire story can almost be seen as a retelling of the Bible as the world in which the characters live becomes adulterated and confusing as time passes. In fact, Márquez regarded the English translation of his novel by Gregory Rabassa to be superior to the original. This book has sold over 50 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages. Not only is Márquez the most well-known writer in this movement, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was published in 1967, is the most well-known work. One Hundred Years of Solitude was written during the Latin American Boom of the ’60s and ’70s and helped spread the genre of magical realism throughout other nations to tell stories of identity and of the colonized and/or oppressed. Despite leaving Colombia for Mexico, and dying there (in 2014), upon his death, Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia regarded Márquez as “the greatest Colombian to ever live.” He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” This novel allowed Europeans to gain a new perspective on the reality of colonized nations. Márquez was born Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez It allowed the forgotten stories of the people from a continent deeply affected by colonization to be told. The New York Times regards the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet, said that it is “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes.” The book not only popularized magical realism as a genre, but also Latin American literature as a whole.

One thousand days of solitude