One Hundred Years of Solitude pdf by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish: Cien años de soledad, American Spanish: [sjen ˈaɲoz ðe soleˈðað]) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the (fictitious) town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in literature. The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement. Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez’s magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in world literature. In this article, you will be able to download One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez pdf as well as do the following:
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One hundred years of solitude Summary by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women—brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul—this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction. This book tells the story of the fictional town of Macondo, of its beginning, prosperity, and inevitable downfall. The story takes place between the early 1800s and the mid-1900s. And as it progresses, we find out that it’s not merely the documentation of the history of the place, but also of the people who found it. It tells the story of how humans are connected to places, to the people around them, and also to solitude. Told from a third-person point of view, this book covers the story of the Buendía family over a century. It recounts their experiences with love, heartbreak, marriages, birth, death and war. It is considered a great book because it expresses all the emotions we feel as humans. We have tried to compile here a taster of the novel a few quotes.
About the author- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the town of Aracataca, Columbia.Latin America’s preeminent man of letters, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. García Márquez began his writing career as a journalist and is the author of numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Autumn of the Patriarch and Love in the Time of Cholera, and the autobiography Living to Tell the Tale. There has been resounding acclaim for his life’s work since he passed away in April 2014.
Information about the book Summary (Amazon)
- Publisher : Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Translation edition (May 30, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 417 pages
- ISBN-10 : 006112009X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061120091
- Lexile measure : 1410L
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.24 x 5.57 x 1.27 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #98,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,151 in Magical Realism
- #1,860 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 517 ratings
Excerpt from one hundred years of solitude pdf by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Chapter One
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons. “Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: “It won’t work for that.” But José Arcadio Buendía at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. Úrsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. “Very soon we’ll have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house,” her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades’ incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman’s hair around its neck.
In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance to the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy woman an arm’s length away. “Science has eliminated distance,” Melquíades proclaimed. “In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.” A burning noonday sun brought out a startling demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they put a pile of dry hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by concentrating the sun’s rays. José Arcadio Buendía, who had still not been consoled for the failure of his magnets, conceived the idea of using that invention as a weapon of war. Again Melquíades tried to dissuade him, but he finally accepted the two magnetized ingots and three colonial coins in exchange for the magnifying glass. Úrsula wept in consternation. That money was from a chest of gold coins that her father had put together over an entire life of privation and that she had buried underneath her bed in hopes of a proper occasion to make use of it. José Arcadio Buendía made no attempt to console her, completely absorbed in his tactical experiments with the abnegation of a scientist and even at the risk of his own life. In an attempt to show the effects of the glass on enemy troops, he exposed himself to the concentration of the sun’s rays and suffered burns which turned into sores that took a long time to heal. Over the protests of his wife, who was alarmed at such a dangerous invention, at one point he was ready to set the house on fire. He would spend hours on end in his room, calculating the strategic possibilities of his novel weapon until he succeeded in putting together a manual of startling instructional clarity and an irresistible power of conviction. He sent it to the government, accompanied by numerous descriptions of his experiments and several pages of explanatory sketches, by a messenger who crossed the mountains, got lost in measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers, and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair, plague, and wild beasts until he found a route that joined the one used by the mules that carried the mail. In spite of the fact that a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at that time, José Arcadio Buendía promised to undertake it as soon as the government ordered him to so that he could put on some practical demonstrations of his invention for the military authorities and could train them himself in the complicated art of solar war. For several years he waited for an answer. Finally, tired of waiting, he bemoaned to Melquíades the failure of his project …
One hundred years in Solitude Quotes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Tell him, that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.” – Colonel Aureliano Buendía
“Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.” –The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.” – The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“For many hours, balancing on the edge of the surprises of a war with no future, in rhymed verse he resolved his experience on the shores of death.” – Aureliano Buendia, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.”- The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“He was sure that sooner or later he would get a daguerreotype of God, if He existed, or put an end once and for all to the supposition of His existence.- The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“He stood up unhurriedly, as if he only intended to stretch, and with a perfectly regulated and methodical fury he grabbed the pots with the begonias one after the other, those with the ferns, the oregano, and one after the other he smashed them onto the floor.” – The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys.”- José Arcadio Buendía, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“He drew it in rage, evilly, exaggerating the difficulties of communication, as if to punish himself for the absolute lack of sense with which he had chosen the place.”- The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“On another occasion, he felt at least a confused sense of shame when he found the smell of Úrsula on his own skin, and more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his.” – The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
“The only one who had not lost for a single minute the awareness that she was alive and rotting in her wormhole was the implacable and aging Amaranta.”- The Narrator, ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. You can buy this great literary classic from the following sites:
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Editorial reviews and praise for the book
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry that is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man. . . . Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life.” — William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review
“More lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man.” — Washington Post Book World
“At 50 years old, García Márquez’s masterpiece is as important as ever. . . To experience a towering work like One Hundred Years of Solitude is to be reminded of the humility we should all feel when trying to assert what is true and what is false.” — LitHub
“An irresistible work of storytelling, mixing the magic of the fairy tale, the realistic detail of the domestic novel and the breadth of the family saga.” — New York Times
“One Hundred Years of Solitude is substantive and substantial, and its prose precise for the simple reason that its sentences are too exquisite to be inessential. It is a novel on which is bestowed the laurels usually awarded to great works of frugal prose. Yet its genius is in the operatic telling.” — The Independent
“One Hundred Years of Solitude offers plenty of reflections on loneliness and the passing of time. It can also be seen as a caustic commentary on the evils of war, or a warm appreciation of familial bonds. García Márquez has urgent things to say that still feel close to home, 50 years after the book was first published.” — The Guardian
“One of the seminal works of 20th century Latin American fiction, it is a classic.” — Variety
“Fecund, savage, irresistible. . . . In all their loves, madness, and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths…the characters rear up large and rippling with life against the green pressure of nature itself.” — Paul West, Book World
Customer reviews on Amazon for one hundred years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Niel Crews
4.0 out of 5 stars something special about the circular motif
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2018
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Confusing? Lengthy? Lot’s of characters, all with practically the same name? Yes, but all for an intended purpose. I picked up this book for an AP Lit project and browsed through some of the reviews to see just what I was about to read. There were plenty of “oh, this is so confusing” and “there are just too many of the same names” reviews. But there were also the reviews that focused on the enriching side of the book. The side that people often overlook. So I figured I would give it a try. It is not a book I would normally have picked up, but it soon surprised me. I remember flipping to the first page and reading the very first line of the book: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Already I was drawn in. There was so much going on in that first line, the rest of the book just had to be interesting too. And it didn’t fail. The book goes through generations of families as they tell their story over time. There is no set protagonist, which bothered me at first, but then I became comfortable with it as I continued reading.
Throughout the book you discover your favorite characters with their quirky personalities. The Buendia family is full of weird adventures and mystical encounters. From the gypsies to the invention of ice, the book jumps around from sentence to sentence illustrating the personality of this family simply in syntax. There is love, civil war, death, magic, and redemption in it’s many pages.
Many reviews had issues with the numerous similar names and found the book simply confusing. But if you were reading the book with a close eye, you realize that it was all for a reason. It was written almost “as if the world were repeating itself.” And as you struggle to read, “time put things in their place.” Yes, these are quotes from the book itself and are so direct to the theme and overall meaning that they seem to be overlooked. The book’s confusing almost repetitive nature was to illustrate a grand motif. The circular motif. How everything comes around in time. That fate is such a huge force in everything that happens.
Overall, I would give this book 4 stars. That seems low for all the good things I had to say about it, but in the end I rate it lower than 5 stars simply because I struggled to relate with it. It was so different from the books I normally read that it became hard to really be drawn into it. I did love however the circle motif and how everything wraps up just as it should. Sure, all of the crazy adventures and writing style was interesting and unique, but it didn’t capture me personally as well as it may have captured someone else. If I were to read this again (or another book by Marquez), however, I believe that I would feel more comfortable with the writing style and mystic side of the culture and I would relate to it better. I would suggest this book to someone who wants to try and read something different from a lot of other “mainstream” books out there.
William P. Xander
5.0 out of 5 stars STUNNING TRANSLATION OF A GREAT WORK OF LITERATURE
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2018
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this is a stunning work, with a translation that is worthy of the author. i was an english teacher and a colleague had dual citizenship with colombia and she read both versions of this work and couldn’t decide between the two. i’ve only read the english translation, but even the translation puts it in the top tier of all the novels i’ve read. that’s good news and bad news maybe. that means that the work is easily available to english-speakers, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read as a work of literature. my guess is that it can be read on several levels at once, but i’ve never talked to anyone about the novel who wasn’t a lit major. this work is so different and so interesting, you should try reading it no matter what your school experience with literature has been.
Markus
5.0 out of 5 stars One for the ages!
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2014
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One Hundred Years of Solitude really isn’t as difficult or confusing as some reviews make it seem. People make it seem like it’s impossible to get through so many repeating names, but even when the characters share a name, almost every single character (until the last generation–and by that point the first characters are long gone so that it wasn’t really confusing) has a unique name. How is that confusing? And anyway, it doesn’t take too many chapters or a genius to figure out they all share the same names for a reason. Also, I must say, if you don’t like the first 50-100 pages, you probably aren’t going to like the rest of the book. It stays like that… Plus, the first Jose Arcadio Buendia is one of the more entertaining characters in the book, in my opinion. But, I think Aureliano Segundo and Remedios The Beauty were the highlights in this book. I was cracking up throughout their scenes.
Although I feel I missed a lot about what was going on symbolically whilst reading (mostly a lot of the religious stuff), I still found this book to be extremely enjoyable. It’s inspiring and surreal, whimsical, funny and sad–and it all causes a person to feel very introspective, because it blends so many aspects of what makes up a person’s life. I looked up some of the themes and motifs after reading to make sure I caught everything, and I prefer many of my own interpretations. And I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meant to write it in a way that was a more personal experience. At the end notes, he mentions in an interview how he wanted to capture the way an abuela tells stories to her grandchildren– and I got that vibe the whole time. And a lot of times, the surreal in crazy old latin american stories is what makes you remember the life lessons behind the story. And I feel like that’s what happened here.
But again, I feel like most people I know wouldn’t like this book, and I can see where they’re coming from. It definitely isn’t for everyone. And I must stress that that’s not coming from a pretentious place. His writing style will be frustrating to many readers I’d presume, because it’s really just incredibly unique. But, if you can get past the style (long paragraphs, little fluctuation in narration, mentioning things that haven’t really happened yet, or no main protagonist… etc) and the repetition of names, it really isn’t super complicated or anything. It isn’t perfect, but It’s great. And even though I started this review planning to give it four stars, after writing it–I think it’s an important enough, and intricately weaved enough, and a unique enough a piece to warrant a 5-star from this fella.
ITS
5.0 out of 5 stars A Whole Lot of Solitude
Reviewed in Canada on March 27, 2013
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I really enjoyed the book. Whether it is 100 years of Buenida family history spread over 500 pages, it flows very nicely. It’s a page turner of a book, as you pass from one generation to another in a haze of names that keep repeating.
Solitude is a metaphor, for melancholy, seclusion, mental illness, and many more similar feelings. Everybody goes through some dose of solitude through life, and it’s nice to be able to reflect through Marquez’s characters. What is interesting for me though is that most of the characters would be committed into instructions or jailed in our modern societies. However, with all their idiosyncrasies, obsessive-compulsiveness, and plain madness, they all managed to go through their existences long before the advent of mind-numbing medications. Life was sure simpler, and far more entertaining back in this era. I would recommend this book, to anybody who wants to expand their literary horizons, and their understanding of some dark corners of human nature. I can only hope that Marquez is spending the last days of his life at peace with his solitude…
ABC
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, timeless.
Reviewed in Canada on February 17, 2012
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I first read this book in my early teens. At that time I was enthralled. It is a complete epic. Beautiful, with many lessons for our current times too – esp in the last lines. When I re-read the book, while the magic of my first reading is gone, the last lines still give me that ah to hmmm feeling. Since the first book that I owned I have bought it for numerous friends. It should be essential reading for all in schools. Whether you like it or not, it is a complete novel and covers so many aspects of humanity. Must read. On another note, I especially visited Baracoa, the place that Macondo is claimed to be modelled on. Don’t know if that claim is true, or whether it was my imagination, but it did feel a wee bit eerie being there.
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