百年孤独被誉为“再现拉丁美洲历史社会图景的鸿篇巨著”的《百年孤独》，是加西亚·马尔克斯的代表作，也是拉丁美洲魔幻现实主义文学作品中的代表作。这部小说是作者根据拉丁美洲血淋淋的历史事实,凭借自己丰富的想像,描绘而成的。《百年孤独》是哥伦比亚著名作家、诺贝尔文学奖获得者马尔克斯历时18个月创作的一部小说，成书于1966年。被富恩特斯誉为“美洲《圣经》”，多年来年来好评如潮，影响波及了整个世界。
最初令世界震惊的是它独特的叙述方式：“多年以后，奥雷良诺·布恩蒂亚上校面对行刑队，准会想起父亲带他去见识冰块的那个遥远的下午……”这句为全书奠定“圆周模式”或圆形叙事结构的开篇语，仿佛一个永恒而孤寂的圆心，却能把过去和将来牢牢地吸附在某个人们可以想见，甚至感同身受的现在。紧随其后的是作者令人目瞪口呆的魔幻色彩，后现代主义者们对之进行了玄之又玄的解读。
然而，在马尔克斯看来，《百年孤独》只不过是借用了“外祖母的口吻”，“她老人家讲故事就是这种方式，好像人物就在眼前，事情正在发生……而且常常人鬼不分、古今轮回。”如今看来，《百年孤独》的最大特点也许在于：用外祖母的表述方式，展现了美洲人的历史及其扑朔迷离的集体无意识；通过对《圣经》的戏仿和拓展，并借布恩蒂亚一家几代，描绘了人类的发展轨迹——从创始到原始社会、奴隶社会、封建社会，再到资本主义社会，乃至跨国资本主义时代。
《百年孤独》-作者简介
马尔克斯马尔克斯
马尔克斯（Gabriel Garcla Marquez，1928-）哥伦比亚作家，全名：加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯。生于马格达莱纳的阿拉卡塔卡镇的一个医生家庭。8岁前，一直生活在外祖父家。外祖父是位受人尊敬的上校，参加过两次内战。外祖母是位勤劳的主妇，很会讲神话故事。这段充满幻想和神奇色彩的童年生活，为他后来的文学创作提供了丰富的素材。
在中小学学习期间，他阅读了大量的经典作品。18岁入大学攻读法律，因政局动荡而中途辍学，进入报界，并开始文学创作。1955年，第一部长篇小说《枯枝败叶》问世，引起拉美文学界重视，颇受好评。1962年他发表了《恶时辰》，小说获得美国埃索石油公司在波哥大举办的埃索奖。1967年，他的《百年孤独》轰动了西班牙语文学界并奠定了他在世界文坛上的地位。由于这部小说的成功，他先后荣获哥伦比亚文学奖、法国最佳外国作品奖和拉美最高文学奖—一委内瑞拉“罗慕洛·加列戈斯”国际文学奖。并于1982年获诺贝尔文学奖和哥伦比亚语言科学院名誉院士称号。
主要作品有：《枯枝败叶》、《恶时辰》、《百年孤独》、《霍乱时期的爱情》、《迷宫里的将军》、《我的上校外祖父的故事》、《异国故事十二篇》、《米格尔·利了回国历险记》等。
《百年孤独》-著书背景
从1830年至上世纪末的70年间，哥伦比亚爆发过几十次内战，使数十万人丧生。本书以很大的篇幅描述了这方面的史实，并且通过书中主人公带有传奇色彩的生涯集中表现出来。政客们的虚伪，统治者们的残忍，民众的盲从和愚昧等等都写得淋漓尽致。
作家以生动的笔触，刻画了性格鲜明的众多人物，描绘了这个家族的孤独精神。在这个家族中，夫妻之间、父子之间、母女之间、兄弟姐妹之间，没有感情沟通，缺乏信任和了解。尽管很多人为打破孤独进行过种种艰苦的探索，但由于无法找到一种有效的办法把分散的力量统一起来，最后均以失败告终。这种孤独不仅弥漫在布恩地亚家族和马贡多镇，而且渗入了狭隘思想，成为阻碍民族向上、国家进步的一大包袱。作家写出这一点，是希望拉美民众团结起来，共同努力摆脱孤独。所以，《百年孤独》中浸淫着的孤独感，其主要内涵应该是对整个苦难的拉丁美洲被排斥现代文明世界的进程之外的愤懑和抗议，是作家在对拉丁美洲近百年的历史、以及这块大陆上人民独特的生命力、生存状态、想象力进行独特的研究之后形成的倔强的自信。
《百年孤独》-内容梗概
《百年孤独》描写布恩地亚家族7代人的命运，描绘了哥伦比亚农村小镇马孔多从荒芜的沼泽中兴起到最后被一阵旋风卷走而完全毁灭的100多年的图景。马孔多是哥伦比亚农村的缩影，也是整个拉丁美洲的缩影。
何塞·阿卡迪奥·布恩迪亚是西班牙人的后裔，他与乌苏拉新婚时，由于害怕像姨母与叔父结婚那样生出长尾巴的孩子来，于是乌苏拉每夜都会穿上特制的紧身衣，拒绝与丈夫同房。后来丈夫因此而遭邻居阿吉拉尔的耻笑，杀死了阿吉拉尔。从此，死者的鬼魂经常出现在他眼前，鬼魂那痛苦而凄凉的眼神，使他日夜不得安宁。于是他们只好离开村子，外出谋安身之所。他们跋涉了两年多，由此受到梦的启示，他们来到一片滩地上，定居下来。后来又有许多人迁移至此，这地方被命名为马孔多。布恩迪亚家族在马孔多的百年兴废史由此开始。
何塞·阿卡迪奥·布恩迪亚是个富于创造精神的人，他从吉卜赛人那里看到磁铁，便想用它来开采金子。看到放大镜可以聚焦太阳光便试图因此研制一种威力无比的武器。他通过卜吉赛人送给他的航海用的观像仪和六分仪，便通过实验认识到”地球是圆的，像橙子”。他不满于自己所在的贫穷而落后的村落生活，因为马孔多隐没在宽广的沼泽地中，与世隔绝。他决心要开辟一条道路，把马孔多与外界的伟大发明连接起来。可他带一帮人披荆斩棘干了两个多星期，却以失败告终。后来他又研究炼金术，整日沉迷不休。由于他的精神世界与马孔多狭隘的现实格格不入，他陷入孤独的天井中，以致于精神失常，被家人绑在一棵大树上，几十年后才在那棵树上死去。乌苏拉成为家里的顶梁柱，她活了115至120岁。
布恩迪亚家族的第二代有两男一女。老大何塞·阿卡迪奥是在来马孔多的路上出生的。他在那里长大，和一个叫皮拉·苔列娜的女人私通，有了孩子。他十分害怕，后来与家里的养女蕾蓓卡结婚。但他一直对人们怀着戒心，渴望浪迹天涯。后来，他果然随吉卜赛人出走，回来后变得放荡不羁，最后奇怪地被人暗杀了。老二奥雷良诺生于马孔多，在娘肚里就会哭，睁着眼睛出世，从小就赋有预见事物的本领，长大后爱上镇长千金雷梅苔丝。在此之前；他与哥哥的情人生有一子名叫奥雷良诺·何塞。妻子暴病而亡后，他参加了内战，当上上校。他一生遭遇过十四次暗杀，七十三次埋伏和一次枪决，均幸免于难。与17个外地女子姘居，生下17 个男孩。这些男孩以后不约而同回马孔多寻根，却在一星期内全被打死。奥雷良诺年老归家，和父亲一样对炼金术痴迷不已，每日炼金子作小金鱼，一直到死。他们的妹妹阿马兰塔爱上了意大利技师，后又与侄子乱伦，爱情的不如意使她终日把自己关在房中缝制殓衣，孤独万状。
第三代人只有两个堂兄弟，阿卡迪奥和奥雷良诺·何塞。前者不知生母为谁，竟狂热地爱上生母，几乎酿成大错。后者成为马孔多的军队长官，贪赃枉法，最后被保守派军队枪毙。生前他与一女人未婚便生一女两男。其堂弟热恋姑妈阿马兰塔，但无法与她成婚，故而参加军队，去找妓女寻求安慰，最终也死于乱军之中。
第四代即是阿卡迪奥与人私通生下的一女两男。女儿俏姑娘雷梅苦丝楚楚动人，她身上散发着引人不安的气味，曾因此置几个男人于死地。她总愿意裸体，把时间耗费在反复洗澡上面，而她一样在孤独的沙漠上徘徊，后来在晾床单时，被一阵风刮上天不见了，永远消失在空中。她的孪生子弟弟——阿卡迪奥第二，在美国人办的香蕉公司里当监工，鼓动工人罢工。后来，3 000多工人全被镇压遭难，只他一人幸免。他目击政府用火车把工人们的尸体运往海边丢弃，四处诉说这场大屠杀，反被认为神智不清。他无比恐惧失望，最后把自己关在房子里潜心研究吉卜赛人留下的羊皮手稿。另一个奥雷良诺第二终日纵情酒色，弃妻子于不顾，在情妇家中厮混。奇怪的是，这使他家中的牲畜迅速地繁殖，给他带来了财富。他与妻子生有二女一男，后在病痛中死去。因此，人们一直没认清他们兄弟俩儿谁是谁。
布恩迪亚家族的第五代是奥雷良诺第二的一男二女，长子何塞·阿卡迪奥小时便被送往罗马神学院去学习。母亲希望他日后能当主教，但他对此毫无兴趣，只是为了那假想中的遗产，才欺骗母亲。母亲死后，他回家靠变卖家业为生。后为保住乌苏拉藏在地窖里的 7 000多个金币，被歹徒杀死。女儿梅·香梅苔丝与香蕉公司学徒相好，母亲禁止他们见面，他们只好暗中在浴室相会，母亲发现后以偷鸡贼为名打死了他。梅万念俱灰，怀着身孕被送往修道院。小女儿阿马兰塔·乌苏娜早年在布鲁塞尔上学，在那里成婚后归来，见到马孔多一片凋敝，决心重整家园。她朝气蓬勃，充满活力，她的到来，使马孔多出现了一个最特别的人。她的情绪比这家族的人都好，也就是说，她想把一切陈规陋习打入十八层地狱。因此，她订出长远计划，准备定居下来，拯救这个灾难深重的村镇。
布恩迪亚家族的第六代是梅送回的私生子奥雷良诺·布恩迪亚。他出生后一直在孤独中长大。他唯一的嗜好是躲在吉卜赛人梅尔加德斯的房间里研究各种神秘的书籍和手稿。他甚至能与死去多年的老吉卜赛人对话，并受到指示学习梵文。他一直对周围的世界既不关心也不过问，但对中世纪的学问却了如指掌。自从姨母阿玛兰塔·乌苏娜回乡之后，他不知不觉地对她产生了难以克制的恋情，两人发生了乱伦关系，但他们认为，尽管他们受到孤独与爱情的折磨，但他们毕竟是人世间唯一最幸福的人。后来阿玛兰塔·乌苏娜生下了一个健壮的男孩，“他是百年里诞生的布恩迪亚当中惟一由于爱情而受胎的婴儿。”然而，他身上竟长着一条猪尾巴。 阿玛兰塔·乌苏娜产后大出血而亡。
那个长猪尾巴的男孩就是这延续百年的家族的第七代继承人。他被一群蚂蚁围攻并被吃掉。就在这时，奥雷良诺·布恩迪亚终于破译出了梅尔加德斯的手稿。手稿卷首的题辞是：“家族中的第一个人将被绑在树上，家族中的最后一个人将被蚂蚁吃掉。”原来，这手稿记载的正是布恩迪亚家族的历史。在他译完最后一章的瞬间，一场突如其来的飓风把整个儿马孔多镇从地球上刮走，从此这个镇不复存在了。
《百年孤独》-评论
加西亚马尔克斯遵循“变现实为幻想而又不失其真”的魔幻现实主义创作原则，经过巧妙的构思和想象，把触目惊心的现实和源于神话、传说的幻想结合起来，形成色彩斑斓、风格独特的图画，使读者在“似是而非，似非而是”的形象中，获得一种似曾相识又觉陌生的感受，从而激起寻根溯源去追索作家创作真谛的愿望。魔幻现实主义必须以现实力基础，但这并不妨碍它采取极端夸张的手法。如本书写外部文明对马贡多的侵入，是现实的，但又魔幻化了：吉卜赛人拖着两块磁铁 “……挨家串户地走着……铁锅、铁盆、铁钳、小铁炉纷纷从原地落下，木板因铁钉和螺钉没命地挣脱出来而嘎嘎作响……跟在那两块魔铁的后面乱滚”；又如写夜的寂静，人们居然能听到“蚂蚁在月光下的哄闹声、蛀虫啃食时的巨响以及野草生长时持续而清晰的尖叫声”；再如写政府把大批罢工者杀害后，将尸体装上火车运到海里扔掉，那辆火车竟有200节车厢，前、中、后共有 3个车头牵引！作家似乎在不断地变换着哈哈镜、望远镜、放大镜甚至显微镜，读读者看到一幅幅真真假假、虚实交错的画面，从而丰富了想象力，收到强烈的艺术效果。
印第安传说、东方神话以及《圣经》典故的运用，进一步加强了本书的神秘气氛。如写普罗登肖的鬼魂日夜纠缠布恩地亚一家，便取材于印第安传说中冤鬼自己不得安宁也不让仇人安宁的说法；有关飞毯以及俏姑娘雷梅苔丝抓住床单升天的描写是阿拉伯神话《天方夜谭》的引伸；而马贡多一连下了四年十一个月零两天的大雨则是《圣经创世纪》中有关洪水浩劫及挪亚方舟等故事的移植。拉丁美洲的民间传说往往带有迷信色彩，作家在采用这些民间传说时，有时把它们作为现实来描写；如好汉弗朗西斯科“曾和魔鬼对歌，击败了对手”；阿玛兰塔在长廊里绣花时与死神交谈等等。有时则反其意而用之，如写尼卡诺尔神父喝了一杯巧克力后居然能离地12厘米，以证明“上帝有无限神力”等等，显然是对宗教迷信的讽刺和嘲笑。
本书中象征主义手法运用得比较成功且有意义的，应首推关于不眠症的描写。马贡多全体居民在建村后不久都传染上一种不眠症。严重的是，得了这种病，人会失去记忆。为了生活，他们不得不在物品上贴上标签。例如他们在牛身上贴标签道：“这是牛，每天要挤它的奶；要把奶煮开加上咖啡才能做成牛奶咖啡。”这类例子书中比比皆是，作家意在提醒公众牢记容易被人遗忘的历史。
另外，作家还独创了从未来的角度回忆过去的新颖倒叙手法。例如小说一开头，作家就这样写道：“许多年之后，面对行刑队，奥雷良诺布恩地亚上校将会回想起，他父亲带他去见识冰块的那个遥远的下午。”短短的一句话，实际上容纳了未来、过去和现在三个时间层面，而作家显然隐匿在“现在”的叙事角度。紧接着，作家笔锋一转，把读者引回到马贡多的初创时期。这样的时间结构，在小说中一再重复出现，一环接一环，环环相扣，不断地给读者造成新的悬念。
最后，值得注意的是，本书凝重的历史内涵、犀利的批判眼光、深刻的民族文化反省、庞大的神话隐喻体系是由一种让人耳目一新的神秘语言贯串始终的。有的评家认为这部小说出自8岁儿童之口，加西亚马尔克斯对此说颇感欣慰。这是很深刻的评判目光。因为这种直观的、简约的语言确实有效地反映了一种新的视角，一种落后民族（人类儿童）的自我意识。当事人的苦笑取代了旁观者的眼泪，“愚者”自我表达的切肤之痛取代了“智者”貌似公允的批判和分析，更能收到唤起被愚弄者群体深刻反省的客观效果。
《百年孤独》是一部极其丰富的、多层次的小说，它可以有多重解释。它是一部关于霍塞·阿卡狄奥·布恩狄亚几代子孙的家庭编年史；它描写了一个象征着马尔克斯故乡阿拉卡塔卡的小镇马孔多的时代变迁；同时也是哥伦比亚、拉丁美洲和现代世界一个世纪以来风云变幻的神话般的历史。从更深远的意义上说，它是西方文明的一个总结，从它的源头古希腊神话、荷马史诗、《创世纪》中的创世神话开始，带着对蒙昧状态的伊甸园和净土世界那种质朴和纯洁的深深的怀念。读者从作品中读到，这部编年史是一个吉卜赛智者用梵文写的手稿只有布恩狄亚家族的最后的一个男人才能译解，并且只有在每一个读者单独读它时，才能理解它的含义。这是一个充满神奇与狂欢的故事，是这个世界和它的困境、迷信的一面镜子。但它也是一个充满虚构的世界，吸引每一个读者步入令人浮想联翩的幻境。
《百年孤独》-艺术成就
《百年孤独》在艺术上也取得了举世公认的巨大成就。
首先是艺术构思上的魔幻性。《百年孤独》在小说结构上始终贯穿着一条明显的线索，这就是布恩迪亚家族害怕近亲结婚会生出长“猪尾巴”的孩子。这种深深的恐惧作为小说的内在精神弥漫全书，并且代代相传，影响着他们的行为。
其次，故事情节的魔幻性。小说最引人入胜的就是故事情节的魔幻性。许多故事情节神奇怪诞、奇妙无比，看得人眼花缭乱，比如小说的重要情节，关于吉卜赛人梅尔加德斯的神奇故事。梅尔加德斯与布恩迪亚家庭有着密切的关系，梅尔加德斯给布恩迪亚家带来了启蒙知识，后来他死于热病，尸体被抛入大海。但他不堪寂寞，又重回人间，来到马孔多，治好了全镇人的健忘症。不久他又一次死了，这回是淹死在河里。布恩迪亚家埋葬了他，但他的幽灵仍然一直在布恩迪亚家各间房子里游荡，给这个家庭留下了那本神秘的羊皮书手稿。这些充满“魔幻”的故事情节，鲜明地带有拉丁美洲本土传统文化和观念意识的特点。
再次，“魔幻”式的象征和夸张手法。《百年孤独》中广泛地运用了象征和夸张的艺术手法。但和其他文学流派不同的是，这种象征和夸张的手法更多地带有 “魔幻”的色彩。比如，作品中黄色是不幸和死亡的象征，当阿·布恩迪亚死亡时，“窗外下起了细微的黄花雨。整整一夜，黄色的花朵像无声的暴雨，在市镇上空纷纷飘落……翌日早晨，整个马孔多仿佛铺上了一层密实的地毯，所以不得不用铲子和耙子为送葬队伍清理道路。”
最后，作者为了表现拉丁美洲的百年孤独的现实，还特意创造了新的时间观念和表现方法。他认为时间在拉丁美洲是停滞的，是在一个封闭的时间圈里循环的。
《百年孤独》中的第一句话是“多年以后，面对着行刑队，奥雷连诺上校将会想起那久远的一天下午，他父亲带他去认识了冰块。”这就给全书定下了一个基调，即叙述的口吻是站在某一个时间不明确的“现在”去讲述“多年以后”的一个“将来”，然后又从这个“将来”回顾到“那久远的一天”的“过去”。一句话里包含了现在、过去、将来，形成了一个时间性的圆圈。还有，作品中相似的活动、相似的命运，都诉说着时间的封闭性和停滞性。这正是拉丁美洲百年孤独、停滞的社会历史的艺术反映。
总而言之，《百年孤独》的巨大成功，说明马尔克斯站在新的世界普遍性的高度上去认识拉美这块土地、这个民族，从不同角度不同层面反映了民族性与世界性、传统与创新的关系。正因为如此，马尔克斯才能够把他的远见卓识和非凡的艺术才华与拉丁美洲的社会现实完美地结合起来，把魔幻现实主义推上了世界文学的高峰。
《百年孤独》-价值
《百年孤独》的内容异常丰富、复杂而深广，具有很高的思想认识价值。主要表现在两方面：首先，《百年孤独》中的小镇马孔多所经历的兴建、发展、鼎盛到消亡的百年沧桑，影射和浓缩了哥伦比亚自19世纪初到20世纪上半叶的历史。小说开始时是19世纪初，但马孔多却像是史前社会，质朴而宁静，这是个只有20来户人家的小村庄，人们往在河边用泥和芦苇盖的房子里，取水非常方便。河水清澈、明亮、急速地流过，可以看见河床上光洁的鹅卵石，“世界，一切都是刚开始，很多东西还没有名字，必须用手指指着说”。这里，马尔克斯特意引用《圣经》中的话“必须用手指指着说。”，表示马孔多最初就是这样一个与世隔绝的世外桃源。这是16世纪以前哥伦比亚土著生活的写照。随后西班牙殖民者闯入，用箭与火和十字架征服了拉丁美洲，继而大批移民涌入这块大陆，哥伦比亚从社会结构、思想信仰到习俗风尚都发生了深刻变化，形成了哥伦比亚历史上第一次重大转折。小说中有关吉卜赛人带来吸铁石、望远镜等东西像魔术和杂技一样吸引全村人去围观、乌苏拉发现与外界的通道以及引来第一批移民的描写，就是这段史实的再现。
19世纪初哥伦比亚独立后，国家政权被土生白人的大地主、大商人所把持。他们中的自由党、保守党斗争不断，进行长期内战。政客们滥用职权，营私舞弊，操纵选举，践踏宪法，导致国家政变不断、内战频仍。从1830年到1899年，全国爆发了27次内战，给人民带来了无穷无尽的痛苦。小说以很大的篇幅描写马孔多也被卷进了这场斗争。通过奥雷连诺·布恩迪亚上校的传奇生涯表现了这方面的史实。上校为反对腐败的保守党政府，一生发动过32次武装起义，打了20年内战。这些描写生动地概括了哥伦比亚历史上第二次重大转折时期的社会生活。
20世纪初期，哥伦比亚内战停止，经济恢复，但近在咫尺的美国新殖民主义势力又涌进了哥伦比亚。火车、电灯、电话、电影、留声机等出现在马孔多。小说描写马孔多人这样迎接新事物：“马孔多人对电影上活动的人物非常生气，因为他们为电影上一个死了被埋了的人流下痛苦的眼泪，而他却在下一个电影中变成了阿拉伯人出现了，马孔多人受不了这样对他们感情的嘲弄，把电影院的座椅都给砸了。最后镇长解释电影是幻觉的机器，不需要观众这样动感情，马孔多人终于明白了他们上了吉卜赛人新玩意儿的当了，决定再也不看电影。”他们就这样被这些新玩意惊得目瞪口呆，看得眼花缭乱。紧着，美国人又建立了很多香蕉园，各种人像潮水一样涌进马孔多，他们喧宾夺主，控制了马孔多历史上最重大的变革。这种变革从表面上看，好像给马孔多带来了繁荣，但实质上却是外国资本家更加残酷剥削和掠夺的开始，而且为了维护既得利益，帝国主义者用野蛮暴力镇压人民的反抗。在香蕉工人罢工运动中，政府和帝国主义“授命军队不惜用子弹打死他们”，“机枪从两个方面扫射人群。何塞·阿卡迪奥第二倒在地上，满脸是血。他苏醒时才发现自己躺在塞满尸体的火车车厢上。他从一个车厢爬到另一个车厢，透过些微弱的亮光，便看出了死了的男人、女人和孩子：他们像报废的香蕉给扔到大海里……这是他见过的最长的列车—几乎有200节运货车厢。”小说就这样愤怒地揭露了帝国主义、新殖民主义的入侵给哥伦比亚造成的巨大灾难。这也正是造成拉丁美洲贫穷落后的重要原因之一。
其次，小说在对布恩迪亚家族众多人物的刻画中，着力表现了这个家庭成员共同的性格特征，这就是马孔多人的孤独感，从第一代何塞·阿卡迪奥·布恩迪亚到第六代奥雷连诺·布恩迪亚，每个人都生活在自己营造的孤独之中，而且极力保持着这种孤独。第一代布恩迪亚和表妹结婚以后就遭受到孤独的折磨，他由于害怕生下长猪尾巴的孩子而不敢和妻子同房，杀死嘲笑者后又受到鬼魂困扰，不得不远走他乡。晚年，他精神恍惚、疯疯癫癫，最后被绑在栗子树上孤独地死去。第二代奥雷连诺上校年轻时身经百战，却不知为谁卖命。退休后他把自己反锁在屋子里制作小金鱼，做好化掉，化掉再做，“连内心也上了门闩”。第二代中的阿玛兰塔阴险地破坏别人的幸福，又冷酷地拒绝自己的求婚者。她整天为自己织着尸衣，孤独地等待着死神召唤。第四代中俏姑娘雷梅苔丝根本就“不是这个世界的人”，她每天都在浴室是冲洗身子，几小时几小时地打发时间，最后她抓住一条床单飞上了天……这种孤独的恶习在这个家庭代代相传，周而复始，恶性循环，在新人之间筑起一道无形的墙，使人与世隔绝、不思进取、自我封闭、离群索居。它制造了愚味落后、保守僵化的社会现状。作者认为“孤独”已经渗入了拉丁美洲的民族精神，成为阻碍民族上进、国家发展的心理负担。这种孤独的本质是人民因为不能掌握自己的命运而产生的绝望、冷漠和疏离感。它是家族衰败、民族落后、国家灭亡的根源。小说最后描写布恩迪亚家庭连同马孔多小镇被飓风刮走，深刻揭示了由孤独所产生的社会悲剧的必然性。
《百年孤独》全面深刻地提示了拉丁美洲近百年来“孤独”的社会现实和造成这种现状的深刻的历史、政治、经济、文化等诸多方面的原因，是一部当代拉丁美洲的百科全书。
《百年孤独》-书评
被誉为“再现拉丁美洲历史社会图景的鸿篇巨著”的《百年孤独》，是加西亚马尔克斯的代表作，也是拉丁美洲魔幻现实主义文学作品的代表作。全书近30万字，内容庞杂，人物众多，情节曲折离奇，再加上神话故事、宗教典故、民间传说以及作家独创的从未来的角度来回忆过去的新颖倒叙手法等等，令人眼花缭乱。但阅毕全书，读者可以领悟，作家是要通过布恩地亚家族 7代人充满神秘色彩的坎坷经历来反映哥伦比亚乃至拉丁美洲的历史演变和社会现实，要求读者思考造成马贡多百年孤独的原因，从而去寻找摆脱命运括弄的正确途径。
从1830年至上世纪末的70年间，哥伦比亚爆发过几十次内战，使数十万人丧生。本书以很大的篇幅描述了这方面的史实，并且通过书中主人公带有传奇色彩的生涯集中表现出来。政客们的虚伪，统治者们的残忍，民众的盲从和愚昧等等都写得淋漓尽致。作家以生动的笔触，刻画了性格鲜明的众多人物，描绘了这个家族的孤独精神。在这个家族中，夫妻之间、父子之间、母女之间、兄弟姐妹之间，没有感情沟通，缺乏信任和了解。尽管很多人为打破孤独进行过种种艰苦的探索，但由于无法找到一种有效的办法把分散的力量统一起来，最后均以失败告终。这种孤独不仅弥漫在布恩地亚家族和马贡多镇，而且渗入了狭隘思想，成为阻碍民族向上、国家进步的一大包袱。作家写出这一点，是希望拉美民众团结起来，共同努力摆脱孤独。所以，《百年孤独》中浸淫着的孤独感，其主要内涵应该是对整个苦难的拉丁美洲被排斥现代文明世界的进程之外的愤懑和抗议，是作家在对拉丁美洲近百年的历史、以及这块大陆上人民独特的生命力、生存状态、想象力进行独特的研究之后形成的倔强的自信。
加西亚马尔克斯遵循“变现实为幻想而又不失其真”的魔幻现实主义创作原则，经过巧妙的构思和想象，把触目惊心的现实和源于神话、传说的幻想结合起来，形成色彩斑斓、风格独特的图画，使读者在“似是而非，似非而是”的形象中，获得一种似曾相识又觉陌生的感受，从而激起寻根溯源去追索作家创作真谛的愿望。魔幻现实主义必须以现实力基础，但这并不妨碍它采取极端夸张的手法。如本书写外部文明对马贡多的侵入，是现实的，但又魔幻化了：吉卜赛人拖着两块磁铁“……挨家串户地走着……铁锅、铁盆、铁钳、小铁炉纷纷从原地落下，木板因铁钉和螺钉没命地挣脱出来而嘎嘎作响……跟在那两块魔铁的后面乱滚”；又如写夜的寂静，人们居然能听到“蚂蚁在月光下的哄闹声、蛀虫啃食时的巨响以及野草生长时持续而清晰的尖叫声”；再如写政府把大批罢工者杀害后，将尸体装上火车运到海里扔掉，那辆火车竟有200节车厢，前、中、后共有 3个车头牵引！作家似乎在不断地变换着哈哈镜、望远镜、放大镜甚至显微镜，读读者看到一幅幅真真假假、虚实交错的画面，从而丰富了想象力，收到强烈的艺术效果。
印第安传说、东方神话以及《圣经》典故的运用，进一步加强了本书的神秘气氛。如写普罗登肖的鬼魂日夜纠缠布恩地亚一家，便取材于印第安传说中冤鬼自己不得安宁也不让仇人安宁的说法；有关飞毯以及俏姑娘雷梅苔丝抓住床单升天的描写是阿拉伯神话《天方夜谭》的引伸；而马贡多一连下了四年十一个月零两天的大雨则是《圣经创世纪》中有关洪水浩劫及挪亚方舟等故事的移植。拉丁美洲的民间传说往往带有迷信色彩，作家在采用这些民间传说时，有时把它们作为现实来描写；如好汉弗朗西斯科“曾和魔鬼对歌，击败了对手”；阿玛兰塔在长廊里绣花时与死神交谈等等。有时则反其意而用之，如写尼卡诺尔神父喝了一杯巧克力后居然能离地12厘米，以证明“上帝有无限神力”等等，显然是对宗教迷信的讽刺和嘲笑。
本书中象征主义手法运用得比较成功且有意义的，应首推关于不眠症的描写。马贡多全体居民在建村后不久都传染上一种不眠症。严重的是，得了这种病，人会失去记忆。为了生活，他们不得不在物品上贴上标签。例如他们在牛身上贴标签道：“这是牛，每天要挤它的奶；要把奶煮开加上咖啡才能做成牛奶咖啡。”这类例子书中比比皆是，作家意在提醒公众牢记容易被人遗忘的历史。
另外，作家还独创了从未来的角度回忆过去的新颖倒叙手法。例如小说一开头，作家就这样写道：“许多年之后，面对行刑队，奥雷良诺布恩地亚上校将会回想起，他父亲带他去见识冰块的那个遥远的下午。”短短的一句话，实际上容纳了未来、过去和现在三个时间层面，而作家显然隐匿在 “现在”的叙事角度。紧接着，作家笔锋一转，把读者引回到马贡多的初创时期。这样的时间结构，在小说中一再重复出现，一环接一环，环环相扣，不断地给读者造成新的悬念。
最后，值得注意的是，本书凝重的历史内涵、犀利的批判眼光、深刻的民族文化反省、庞大的神话隐喻体系是由一种让人耳目一新的神秘语言贯串始终的。有的评家认为这部小说出自 8岁儿童之口，加西亚马尔克斯对此说颇感欣慰。这是很深刻的评判目光。因为这种直观的、简约的语言确实有效地反映了一种新的视角，一种落后民族（人类儿童）的自我意识。当事人的苦笑取代了旁观者的眼泪，“愚者”自我表达的切肤之痛取代了“智者”貌似公允的批判和分析，更能收到唤起被愚弄者群体深刻反省的客观效果。
《百年孤独》-家族人物表
霍·阿·布恩蒂亚 第一代
乌苏娜 霍·阿·布恩蒂亚之妻 第一代
霍·阿卡蒂奥 霍·阿·布恩蒂亚之长子 第二代
雷贝卡 霍·阿卡蒂奥之妻 第二代
奥雷连诺上校 霍·阿·布恩蒂亚之次子 第二代
雷麦黛丝·摩斯柯特 奥雷连诺上校之妻 第二代
阿玛兰塔 霍·阿·布恩蒂亚之小女儿 第二代
皮拉·苔列娜 霍·阿卡蒂奥之情妇 第二代
阿卡蒂奥 霍·阿卡蒂奥之子 第三代
圣索菲娅·德拉佩德 阿卡蒂奥之妻 第三代
奥雷连诺·霍塞 奥雷连诺上校之子 第三代
十七个奥雷连诺 奥雷连诺上校之子 第三代
俏姑娘雷麦黛丝 阿卡蒂奥之长女 第四代
霍·阿卡蒂奥第二 阿卡蒂奥之次子 第四代
奥雷连诺第二 阿卡蒂奥之小儿子 第四代
菲兰达·德卡皮奥 奥雷连诺第二之妻 第四代
佩特娜·柯特 奥雷连诺第二之情妇 第四代
霍·阿卡蒂奥（神学院学生） 奥雷连诺第二之长子 第五代
梅梅（雷纳塔） 奥雷连诺第二之次女 第五代
巴比洛尼亚 梅梅之夫 第五代
阿玛兰塔·乌苏娜 奥雷连诺第二之小女儿 第五代
加斯东 阿玛兰塔·乌苏娜之夫 第五代
奥雷连诺·布恩蒂亚（破译手稿者）梅梅之子 第六代
有尾巴的婴儿 奥雷连诺·布恩蒂亚之后代 第七代
《百年孤独》-写作特点
我加西亚·马尔克斯遵循“变现实为幻想而又不失其真”的魔幻现实主义创作原则，经过巧妙的构思和想象，把触目惊心的现实和源于神话、传说的幻想结合起来，形成色彩斑斓、风格独特的图画，使读者在“似是而非，似非而是”的形象中，获得一种似曾相识又觉陌生的感受，从而激起寻根溯源去追索作家创作真谛的愿望。魔幻现实主义必须以现实力基础，但这并不妨碍它采取极端夸张的手法。如本书写外部文明对马贡多的侵入，是现实的，但又魔幻化了：吉卜赛人拖着两块磁铁“……挨家串户地走着……铁锅、铁盆、铁钳、小铁炉纷纷从原地落下，木板因铁钉和螺钉没命地挣脱出来而嘎嘎作响……跟在那两块魔铁的后面乱滚”；又如写夜的寂静，人们居然能听到“蚂蚁在月光下的哄闹声、蛀虫啃食时的巨响以及野草生长时持续而清晰的尖叫声”；再如写政府把大批罢工者杀害后，将尸体装上火车运到海里扔掉，那辆火车竟有200节车厢，前、中、后共有3个车头牵引！作家似乎在不断地变换着哈哈镜、望远镜、放大镜甚至显微镜，让读者看到一幅幅真真假假、虚实交错的画面，从而丰富了想象力，收到强烈的艺术效果。
印第安传说、东方神话以及《圣经》典故的运用，进一步加强了本书的神秘气氛。如写普罗登肖的鬼魂日夜纠缠布恩地亚一家，便取材于印第安传说中冤鬼自己不得安宁也不让仇人安宁的说法；有关飞毯以及俏姑娘雷梅苔丝抓住床单升天的描写是阿拉伯神话《天方夜谭》的引伸；而马贡多一连下了四年十一个月零两天的大雨则是《圣经·创世纪》中有关洪水浩劫及挪亚方舟等故事的移植。拉丁美洲的民间传说往往带有迷信色彩，作家在采用这些民间传说时，有时把它们作为现实来描写；如好汉弗朗西斯科“曾和魔鬼对歌，击败了对手”；阿玛兰塔在长廊里绣花时与死神交谈等等。有时则反其意而用之，如写尼卡诺尔神父喝了一杯巧克力后居然能离地12厘米，以证明“上帝有无限神力”等等，显然是对宗教迷信的讽刺和嘲笑。
本书中象征主义手法运用得比较成功且有意义的，应首推关于不眠症的描写。马贡多全体居民在建村后不久都传染上一种不眠症。严重的是，得了这种病，人会失去记忆。为了生活，他们不得不在物品上贴上标签。例如他们在牛身上贴标签道：“这是牛，每天要挤它的奶；要把奶煮开加上咖啡才能做成牛奶咖啡。”这类例子书中比比皆是，作家意在提醒公众牢记容易被人遗忘的历史。
另外，作家还独创了从未来的角度回忆过去的新颖倒叙手法。例如小说一开头，作家就这样写道：“许多年之后，面对行刑队，奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校将会回想起，他父亲带他去见识冰块的那个遥远的下午。”短短的一句话，实际上容纳了未来、过去和现在三个时间层面，而作家显然隐匿在“现在”的叙事角度。紧接着，作家笔锋一转，把读者引回到马贡多的初创时期。这样的时间结构，在小说中一再重复出现，一环接一环，环环相扣，不断地给读者造成新的悬念。
最后，值得注意的是，本书凝重的历史内涵、犀利的批判眼光、深刻的民族文化反省、庞大的神话隐喻体系是由一种让人耳目一新的神秘语言贯串始终的。有的评家认为这部小说出自8岁儿童之口，加西亚·马尔克斯对此说颇感欣慰。这是很深刻的评判目光。因为这种直观的、简约的语言确实有效地反映了一种新的视角，一种落后民族（人类儿童）的自我意识。当事人的苦笑取代了旁观者的眼泪， “愚者”自我表达的切肤之痛取代了“智者”貌似公允的批判和分析，更能收到唤起被愚弄者群体深刻反省的客观效果。
《百年孤独》被认为是拉丁美洲“文学爆炸”时代的代表作品。在世界文学史上占有重要的地位。在拉美世界只有博尔赫斯等少数作家可以媲美。而且在世界各地掀起了拉美文学风。魔幻现实主义也被认为是只具有创意的写作手法之一。
The novel chronicles the history of the Buendía family in the town founded by their patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía. It is built on multiple time frames, playing on ideas presented earlier by Jorge Luis Borges in stories such as The Garden of Forking Paths.
Biographical background and publication
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927. García Márquez is a Colombian-born author and journalist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and a pioneer of the Latin American “Boom.” Affectionately known as “Gabo” to millions of readers, he first won international fame with his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth century literature . His Colombian roots influenced large parts of the novel, as evidenced by the different myths throughout the novel . These myths, along with events in the novel, recount a large portion of Colombian history. For instance, “the arguments over reform in the nineteenth century, the arrival of the railway, the War of the Thousand Days, the American fruit company, the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking plantation workers” are all incorporated in the novel at one point or another".
Plot summary
The novel chronicles the seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo. The family patriarch and founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and his wife (and first cousin), Úrsula, leave their home in Riohacha, Colombia in hopes of finding a new home. One night on their journey while camping on the banks of a river, José Arcadio Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo. Upon awakening, José Arcadio Buendía decides to found this city on the site of their campground. After wandering aimlessly in the jungle for many days, the founding of Macondo can be seen as the founding of UtopiaJosé Arcadio Buendía believes it to be surrounded by water, and from this 'island' he invents the world according to him, naming things at will. After its establishment, Macondo soon becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events. All the events revolve around the many generations of the Buendía family, who are either unable or unwilling to escape periodic, mostly self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, Macondo is destroyed by a terrible hurricane, which symbolizes the cyclical turmoil inherent in Macondo. At the end of the book one of the Buendía male decendants finally cracks a cipher that the males in his family had been trying to solve for generation. The cipher stated all the events that the Buendía family had gone through. Note that this information was available at the beginning of time, and in possession of the Buendia family, before Macondo was even thought of, just indecipherable.
Historical Context
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered a work of fiction, Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian native, drew upon his country’s history to create a world which parallels many of the major events in Colombia’s history, thus establishing the novel as a piece of critical interpretation.
Prior to European conquest, the region now called Colombia had no cultural developments akin to those of the Incas, the Mayas or the Aztecs The region consisted mainly of large families grouped into larger units that served to define local monarchies . The most well defined tribal groups of the area were the Tairona, the Cenu, the Chibcha . The first Spanish settlement was established in 1509 under the direction of Vasco Nunez de Balboa, as a precursor to the conquest of the territory . Marquez uses the founding of the town of Macondo by the Buendia family as a metaphor for the colonization of the region of Colombia.
After Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada’s conquest of the Chibchas in 1538, Bogotá became the center of Spanish rule . After the collapse of Spanish control in 1810, provincial juntas sprang up almost everywhere to challenge Bogotá’s authority. Eventually though, royalist armies led by Pablo Morillo restored Spanish rule in 1816. Three years later when Simon Bolivar began a second war for independence, he declared the creation of a supranational state-Gran Colombia. With its capital at Bogotá, Gran Colombia survived long enough to witness Spain's final defeat in 1825.
The achievement of Independence in 1819 revealed the further obstacles. Colombia’s geography was a formidable obstacle to modernization. High transportation costs made self-sufficient and disconnected enclaves viable much like the description of the town of Macondo). Colombia had been wrestling with modernity since the eighteenth century. The dynamism of the capitalist revolution gave Colombia’s ruling classes a stark choice: integration with the modern industrial world or perishing in a backwater of barbarism. To incorporate the country with the world, Colombia would have to look to the institutional, political, and economic models of Europe and the United States.
“As nineteenth century Colombians explored, described, and colonized their interior, they mapped racial hierarchy onto an emerging national geography composed of distinct localities and regions. This created a racialized discourse of regional differentiation that assigned greater morality and progress to certain regions that they marked as “white”. Meanwhile, those places defined as “black” and “Indian” were associated with disorder, backwardness, and danger” technology and modernization became associated with race.
In Macondo, with the introduction of technology, a rising population, and modernization came the insomnia plague, which was characterized by forgetfulness. The people of Macondo forgot the words for objects (such as tables and chairs) and eventually forgot the significance or usages of these objects. Not only does this serve as a criticism by Marquez of the modernization of Colombia, but also of the plagues characteristic of the Spanish conquest, which killed many indigenous people throughout the South American continent and the Caribbean. It is estimated that smallpox killed up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas during the conquest. The insomnia of the story represents the nostalgia for the better days of the past, which are now lost upon the residents of Macondo (as a metaphor for Colombia): days before the modernization of the town and before the spread of deadly disease.
The history of Colombia is one that has been marked by years of violence, from wars for independence to the modern-day rebel group commonly known as the FARC. The first major violence in Colombia was a product of the Bolivar Liberation from 1810 to 1821. The leader of the revolution, Simon Bolivar, led many battles against the Spanish in an attempt to free the country from Spanish rule. After independence, well-defined socioeconomic regions, divided in a roughly north-south direction by parallel spurs of the Andes mountains, came into being. During the nineteenth century, the existence of several powerful regional centers undoubtedly contributed to civil disorder . Politically, the relative dispersion of the population and its economic resources caused difficulties for the government’s modernizing programs.
In 1934 a reformist wave brought Dr. Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo to the presidency by unanimous Liberal choice. Lopez imposed La Revolución en Marcha, a revolution characterized by labor reform and social legislation, which angered many Conservatives. In August 1946, Mariano Ospina Pérez took office as the first Conservative president of Colombia. This marked the start of a political breakdown that drew the people under increasingly undemocratic rule . On April 9, 1948, influential and celebrated Liberal candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was assassinated, sparking the period of Colombia’s history known as “la Violencia”.
By the mid-1960’s, Colombia had witnessed in excess of two hundred thousand politically motivated deaths. La Violencia, from 1946–66, can be broken into five stages: the revival of political violence before and after the presidential election of 1946, the popular urban upheavals generated by Gaitan’s assassination, open guerrilla warfare, first against Conservative government of Ospina Perez, incomplete attempts at pacification and negotiation resulting from the Rojas Pinilla (who had ousted Laureano Gómez), and, finally, disjointed fighting under the Liberal/Conservative coalition of the “National Front,” from 1958 to 1975.
The politically charged violence characteristic of Colombia’s history is paralleled in One Hundred Years of Solitude by the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who wages war against the Conservatives who are facilitating the rise to power of foreign imperialists. The wealthy banana plantation owners (perhaps based on the United Fruit Co.) set up their own dictatorial police force, which brutally attacks citizens for even the slightest offenses.
The use of real events and Colombian history by Garcia Marquez makes One Hundred Years of Solitude an excellent example of magical realism. Not only are the events of the story an interweaving of reality and fiction, but the novel as a whole tells the history of Colombia from a critical perspective using magical realism. In this way, the novel compresses several centuries of Latin American history into a manageable text.
Furthermore, the novel points out that the current state of Latin America is the result of the inability to obtain the confidence required to construct a meaningful sense of direction and progress. The tragedy of Latin America is that it lacks a meaningful and solid identity, causing a lack of self-preservation. This can be attributed to a past highlighted by five hundred years of colonization. Subsequently, there is a seemingly perpetual repetition of violence, repression, and exploitation resulting in a loss of authenticity. The reality of Latin America is presented as a reoccurring fantastical world in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a vacuum in which the characters have no chance of survival. The desire for change and forward movement exists in Macondo, just as it does in the countries of Latin America. However, the cyclical nature of time in the novel symbolizes the tendency toward repeating history in reality. Subsequently, meaningful progress is never achieved in Macondo or in Latin America. In this manner, Marquez provides insight into the feeling of solitude in present-day Latin America.
Symbolism and metaphors
A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. "The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history". "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions.
The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. "Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities.The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.
The Ghosts that haunt the people of Macondo are symbols of an inescapable past."Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions".
Márquez uses colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used colours and they are symbols of imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.
The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the ill fate of Macondo. Higgins writes that, "By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history". Images such as the glass city and the ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined and is, therefore, fated for destruction.
Overall, there is an underlying pattern of Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It could be said that the novel is one of a number of texts that "Latin American culture has created to understand itself" . In this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive. This archive narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. Melquiades, the keeper of the historical archive in the novel, represents both the whimsical and the literary. Finally, “the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain”
Characters
Buendía Family Tree
First generation
José Arcadio Buendía
Jose Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and the founder of Macondo. Buendía leaves Riohacha, Colombia with his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, after murdering Prudencio Aguilar in a duel. One night camping at the side of a river, Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo and decides to establish the town in this location. Jose Arcadio is an introspective, inquisitive man of massive strength and energy who spends more time on his scientific pursuits than with his family. He flirts with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and community. Marquez uses carefully chosen diction, imagery and biblical references to portray this wonderfully unique character to the reader .
Úrsula Iguarán
Úrsula Iguarán is one of the two matriarchs of the Buendía family and is wife to José Arcadio Buendía.
Second generation
José Arcadio
José Arcadio Buendía's firstborn son, José Arcadio seems to have inherited his father's headstrong, impulsive mannerisms. He eventually leaves the family to chase a Gypsy girl and unexpectedly returns many years later as an enormous man covered in tattoos, claiming that he's sailed the seas of the world. He marries his adopted sister Rebeca, causing his banishment from the mansion, and he dies from a mysterious gunshot wound, days after saving his brother from execution.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía
José Arcadio Buendía's second son and the first person to be born in Macondo. He was thought to have premonitions because everything he said came true.He represents not only a warrior figure but also an artist due to his ability to write poetry and create finely crafted golden fish. During the wars he fathered 17 children by unknown women.
Remedios Moscote
Remedios was the youngest daughter of the town's Conservative administrator, Don Apolinar Moscote. Her most striking physical features are her beautiful skin and her emerald-green eyes. The future Colonel Aureliano falls in love with her, despite her extreme youth. She dies shortly after the marriage from a blood poisoning illness during her pregnancy.
Amaranta
The third child of José Arcadio Buendía, Amaranta grows up as a companion of her adopted sister Rebeca. However, her feelings toward Rebeca turn sour over Pietro Crespi, whom both sisters intensely desire in their teenage years. Amaranta dies a lonely and virginal spinster, but comfortable in her existence after having finally accepted what she had become.
Rebeca
Rebeca is the orphaned daughter of Ursula Iguaran's second cousins. At first she is extremely timid, refuses to speak, and has the habits of eating earth and whitewash from the walls of the house, a condition known as pica. She arrives carrying a canvas bag containing her parents' bones and seems not to understand or speak Spanish. However, she responds to questions asked by Visitacion and Cataure in the Guajiro or Wayuu language. She falls in love with and marries her adoptive brother José Arcadio after his return from traveling the world. After his mysterious and untimely death, she lives in seclusion for the rest of her life.
Third generation
Arcadio
Arcadio is José Arcadio's illegitimate son by Pilar Ternera. He is a schoolteacher who assumes leadership of Macondo after Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves. He becomes a tyrannical dictator and uses his schoolchildren as his personal army. Macondo soon becomes subject to his whims. When the Liberal forces in Macondo fall, Arcadio is shot by a Conservative firing squad.
Aureliano José
Aureliano José is the illegitimate son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Pilar Ternera. He joins his father in several wars before deserting to return to Macondo. He deserted because he is obsessed with his aunt, Amaranta, who raised him since his birth. He is eventually shot to death by a Conservative captain midway through the wars.
Santa Sofía de la Piedad
Santa Sofía is a beautiful virgin girl and the daughter of a shopkeeper. She is hired by Pilar Ternera to have sex with her son Arcadio, her eventual husband. She is taken in along with her children by the Buendías after Arcadio's execution. After Úrsula's death she leaves unexpectedly, not knowing her destination.
17 Aurelianos
During his 32 civil war campaigns, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has 17 sons by 17 different women, each named after their father.. Four of these Aurelianos (A. Triste, A. Serrador, A. Arcaya and A. Centeno) stay in Macondo and become a permanent part of the family. Eventually, as revenge against the Colonel, all are assassinated by the government, which identified them by the mysteriously permanent Ash Wednesday cross on their foreheads. The only survivor of the massacre is A. Amador, who escapes into the jungle only to be assassinated at the doorstep of his father's house many years later.
Fourth generation
Remedios the Beauty
Remedios the Beauty is Arcadio and Santa Sofía's first child. It is said she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, and unintentionally causes the deaths of several men who love or lust over her. She appears to most of the town as naively innocent, and some come to think that she is mentally retarded. However, Colonel Aureliano Buendía believes she has inherited great lucidity: "It is as if she's come back from twenty years of war," he said. She rejects clothing and beauty. Too beautiful and, arguably, too wise for the world, Remedios ascends into the sky one morning, while folding laundry.
José Arcadio Segundo
José Arcadio Segundo is the twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, the children of Arcadio and Santa Sofía. Úrsula believes that the two were switched in their childhood, as José Arcadio begins to show the characteristics of the family's Aurelianos, growing up to be pensive and quiet. He plays a major role in the banana worker strike, and is the only survivor when the company massacres the striking workers. Afterward, he spends the rest of his days studying the parchments of Melquiades, and tutoring the young Aureliano. He dies at the exact instant that his twin does.
Aureliano Segundo
Of the two brothers, Aureliano Segundo is the more boisterous and impulsive, much like the José Arcadios of the family. He takes his first girlfriend Petra Cotes as his mistress during his marriage to the beautiful and bitter Fernanda del Carpio. When living with Petra, his livestock propagate wildly, and he indulges in unrestrained revelry. After the long rains, his fortune dries up, and the Buendías are left almost penniless. He turns to search for a buried treasure, which nearly drives him to insanity. He dies of throat cancer at the same moment as his twin. During the confusion at the funeral, the bodies are switched, and each is buried in the other's grave (highlighting Ursula's earlier comment that they had been switched at birth). Aureliano Segundo represents Colombia's economy: gaining and losing weight according to the situation at the time.
Fernanda del Carpio
Fernanda del Carpio is the only major character (except for Rebeca and the First generation) not from Macondo. She comes from a ruined, aristocratic family that kept her isolated from the world. She was chosen as the most beautiful of 5000 girls. Fernanda is brought to Macondo to compete with Remedios for the title of Queen of the carnival after her father promises her she will be the Queen of Madagascar. After the fiasco, she marries Aureliano Segundo and soon takes the leadership of the family away from the now-frail Úrsula. She manages the Buendía affairs with an iron fist. She has three children by Aureliano Segundo, José Arcadio, Renata Remedios, a.k.a. Meme, and Amaranta Úrsula. She remains in the house after he dies, taking care of the household until her death.
Fernanda is never accepted by anyone in the Buendía household who regard her as an outsider. Although, none of the Buendías rebel against her inflexible conservatism. Her mental and emotional instability is revealed through her paranoia, her correspondence with the 'invisible doctors', and her irrational behavior towards Aureliano, whom she tries to isolate from the whole world.
Fifth generation
Renata Remedios (a.k.a. Meme)
Renata Remedios, or Meme is the second child and first daughter of Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo. While she doesn't inherit Fernanda's beauty, she does have Aureliano Segundo's love of life and natural charisma. After her mother declares that she is to do nothing but play the clavichord, she is sent to school where she receives her performance degree as well as academic recognition. While she pursues the clavichord with 'an inflexible discipline', to placate Fernanda, she also enjoys partying and exhibits the same tendency towards excess as her father.
Meme meets and falls in love with Mauricio Babilonia, but when Fernanda discovers their affair, she arranges for Mauricio to be shot, claiming that he was a chicken thief. She then takes Meme to a convent. Meme remains mute for the rest of her life, partially because of the trauma, but also as a sign of rebellion. Several months later she gives birth to a son, Aureliano, at the convent. He is sent to live with the Buendías. She dies of old age in a hospital in Krakow.
José Arcadio (II)
José Arcadio II, named after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, follows the trend of previous Arcadios. He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to become Pope. He returns from Rome without having become a priest. Eventually, he discovers buried treasure, which he wastes on lavish parties and escapades with adolescent boys. Later, he begins a tentative friendship with Aureliano Babilonia, his nephew. José Arcadio plans to set Aureliano up in a business and return to Rome, but is murdered in his bath by four of the adolescent boys who ransack his house and steal his gold.
Amaranta Úrsula
Amaranta Úrsula is the third child of Fernanda and Aureliano. She displays the same characteristics as her namesake who dies when she is only a child. She never knows that the child sent to the Buendía home is her nephew, the illegitimate son of Meme. He becomes her best friend in childhood. She returns home from Europe with an elder husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs him of her passionate affair with her nephew, Aureliano. She dies of hemorragia, after she has given birth to the last of the Buendía line.
Sixth generation
Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II)
Aureliano Babilonia, or Aureliano II, is the illegitimate child of Meme. He is hidden from everyone by his grandmother, Fernanda. He is strikingly similar to his namesake, the Colonel, and has the same character patterns as well. He is taciturn, silent, and emotionally charged. He barely knows Úrsula, who dies during his childhood. He is a friend of José Arcadio Segundo, who explains to him the true story of the banana worker massacre.
While other members of the family leave and return, Aureliano stays in the Buendía home. He only ventures into the empty town after the death of Fernanda. He works to decipher the parchments of Melquíades but stops to have an affair with his childhood partner and the love of his life, Amaranta Úrsula, not knowing that she is his aunt. When both her and her child die, he is able to decipher the parchments. "...Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: 'The first in line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants'." It is assumed he dies in the great wind that destroys Macondo the moment he finishes reading Mequiades' parchments.
Seventh generation
Aureliano (III)
Aureliano III is the child of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula. He is born with a pig's tail, as the eldest and long dead Úrsula had always feared would happen (the parents of the child had never heard of the omen). His mother dies after giving birth to him, and, due to his grief-stricken father's negligence, he is devoured by ants.
Others
Melquíades
Melquíades is one of a band of gypsies who visit Macondo every year in March, displaying amazing items from around the world. Melquíades sells José Arcadio Buendía several new inventions including a pair of magnets and an alchemist's lab. Later, the gypsies report that Melquíades died in Singapore, but he, nonetheless, returns to live with the Buendía family, stating he could not bear the solitude of death. He stays with the Buendías and begins to write the mysterious parchments that Aureliano Babilonia eventually translates, before dying a second time. This time he drowns in the river near Macondo. He is buried in a grand ceremony organized by the Buendías.
Pilar Ternera
Pilar is a local woman who sleeps with the brothers Aureliano and José Arcadio. She becomes mother of their sons, Aureliano and José Arcadio. Pilar reads the future with cards, and every so often makes an accurate, though vague, prediction. She has close ties with the Buendias throughout the whole novel, helping them with her card predictions. She dies some time after she turns 145 years old (she had eventually stopped counting), surviving until the very last days of Macondo.
The word "Ternera" in Spanish signifies veal or calf, which is fitting considering the way she is treated by Aureliano, Jose Arcadio, and Arcadio. Also, it could be a play on the word "Ternura", which in Spanish means "Tenderness". Pilar is always presented as a very loving figure, and the author often uses names in a similar fashion.
Pietro Crespi
Pietro is a very handsome and polite Italian musician who runs a music school. He installs the pianola in the Buendía house. He becomes engaged to Rebeca, but Amaranta, who also loves him, manages to delay the wedding for years. When José Arcadio and Rebeca agree to be married, Pietro begins to woo Amaranta, who is so embittered that she cruelly rejects him. Despondent over the loss of both sisters, he kills himself.
Petra Cotes
Petra is a dark-skinned woman with gold-brown eyes similar to those of a panther. She is Aureliano Segundo's mistress and the love of his life. She arrives in Macondo as a teenager with her first husband. She briefly dates both of them before her husband dies. After José Arcadio decides to leave her, Aureliano Segundo gets her forgiveness and remains by her side. He continues to see her, even after his marriage. He eventually lives with her, which greatly embitters his wife, Fernanda del Carpio. When Aureliano and Petra make love, their animals reproduce at an amazing rate, but their livestock is wiped out during the four years of rain. Petra makes money by keeping the lottery alive and provides food baskets for Fernanda and her family after the death of Aureliano Segundo.
Mr. Herbert and Mr. Brown
Mr. Herbert is a gringo who showed up at the Buendía house for lunch one day. After tasting the local bananas for the first time, he arranges for a banana company to set up a plantation in Macondo. The plantation is run by the dictatorial Mr. Brown. When José Arcadio Segundo helps arrange a workers' strike on the plantation, the company traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them down in the town square. The banana company and the government completely cover up the event. José Arcadio is the only one who remembers the slaughter. The company arranges for the army to kill off any resistance, then leaves Macondo for good. That event is likely based on the Banana massacre, that took place in Santa Marta, Colombia in 1928.
Mauricio Babilonia
Mauricio is a brutally honest, generous and handsome mechanic for the banana company. He is said to be a descendant of the gypsies who visit Macondo in the early days. He has the unusual characteristic of being constantly swarmed by yellow butterflies, which follow even his lover for a time. Mauricio begins a romantic affair with Meme until Fernanda discovers them and tries to end it. When Mauricio continues to sneak into the house to see her, Fernanda has him shot, claiming he is a chicken thief. Paralyzed and bedridden, he spends the rest of his long life in solitude.
Gastón
Gastón is Amaranta Úrsula's wealthy, Belgian husband. She marries him in Europe and returns to Macondo leading him on a silk leash. Gastón is about fifteen years older than his wife. He is an aviator and an adventurer. When he moves with Amaranta Ursula to Macondo he thinks it is only a matter of time before she realizes that her European ways out of place, causing her to want to move back to Europe. However, when he realizes his wife intends to stay in Macondo, he arranges for his airplane to be shipped over so he can start an airmail service. The plane is shipped to Africa by mistake. When he travels there to claim it, Amaranta writes him of her love for Aureliano Babilonia Buendía. Gastón takes the news in stride, only asking that they ship him his velocipede.
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez is only a minor character in the novel but he has the distinction of bearing the same name as the author. He is the great-great-grandson of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. He and Aureliano Babilonia are close friends because they know the history of the town, which no one else believes. He leaves for Paris after winning a contest and decides to stay there, selling old newspapers and empty bottles. He is one of the few who is able to leave Macondo before the town is wiped out entirely.
Major themes
The subjectivity of reality and Magical Realism
Critics often cite certain works by García Márquez, such as A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as exemplary of magical realism, a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary. The term was coined by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925.
The novel presents a fictional story in a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characteres are fabricated. However the message that Marquez intends to deliver explains a true history. Marquez utilizes his fantastic story as an expression of reality. "In One Hundred Years of Solitude myth and history overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. Marquez’s novel can furthermore be referred to as anthropology, where truth is found in language and myth. What is real and what is fiction are indistinguishable. There are three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling mythical heroes, and supernatural elements" Magical realism is inherent in the novel-achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. This magical realism strikes at one's traditional sense of naturalistic fiction. There is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo. It is a state of mind as much as, or more than, a geographical place. For example, one learns very little about its actual physical layout. Furthermore, once in it, the reader must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author presents to him or her.
García Márquez achieves a perfect blend of the real with the magical through the masterful use of tone and narration. By maintaining the same tone throughout the novel, Márquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary. His condensation of and lackadaisical manner in describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is, thereby perfectly blending the real with the magical. Reinforcing this effect is the unastonished tone in which the book is written. This tone restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the novel, however, it also causes the reader to call into question the limits of reality. Furthermore, maintaining the same narrator throughout the novel familiarizes the reader with his voice and causes he or she to become accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel .
The fluidity of time
One Hundred Years of Solitude contains several ideas concerning time. Although the story can be read as a linear progression of events, both when considering individual lives and Macondo's history, García Márquez allows room for several other interpretations of time:
* He reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. Over six generations, all the José Arcadios possess inquisitive and rational dispositions as well as enormous physical strength. The Aurelianos, meanwhile, lean towards insularity and quietude. This repetition of traits reproduces the history of the individual characters and, ultimately, a history of the town as a succession of the same mistakes ad infinitum due to some endogenous hubris in our nature.
* The novel explores the issue of timelessness or eternity even within the framework of mortal existence. A major trope with which it accomplishes this task is the alchemist's laboratory in the Buendía family home. The laboratory was first designed by Melquíades near the start of the story and remains essentially unchanged throughout its course. It is a place where the male Buendía characters can indulge their will to solitude, whether through attempts to deconstruct the world with reason as in the case of José Arcadio Buendía, or by the endless creation and destruction of golden fish as in the case of his son Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Furthermore, a sense of inevitability prevails throughout the text. This is a feeling that regardless of what way one looks at time, its encompassing nature is the one truthful admission.
* On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that One Hundred Years of Solitude, while basically chronological and "linear" enough in its broad outlines, also shows abundant zigzags in time, both flashbacks of matters past and long leaps towards future events. One example of this is the youthful amour between Meme and Mauricio Babilonia, which is already in full swing before we are informed about the origins of the affair .
Incest
A recurring theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the Buendía family's propensity toward incest. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendía, is the first of numerous Buendías to intermarry when he marries his first cousin, Úrsula. It is worth noting that this initial, incestuous act can be viewed as an "original sin", however it will not be the last one. Furthermore, the fact that "throughout the novel the family is haunted by the fear of punishment in the form of the birth of a monstrous child with a pig's tail" can be attributed to this initial, and the recurring acts of incest among the Buendías.
Solitude
Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for him or her self, the Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel. This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios, who destroys the lives of four men enamored by her beauty. Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.
The selfishness of the Buendía family is eventually broken by the once superficial Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, who discover a sense of mutual solidarity and the joy of helping others in need during Macondo's economic crisis. This pair even finds love, and their pattern is repeated by Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula. Eventually, Aureliano and Amaranta decide to have a child, and the latter is convinced that it will represent a fresh start for the once-conceited Buendía family. However, the child turns out to be the perpetually-feared monster with the pig's tail.
Nonetheless, the appearance of love represents a shift in Macondo, albeit one that leads to its destruction. "The emergence of love in the novel to displace the traditional egoism of the Buendías reflects the emergence of socialist values as a political force in Latin America, a force that will sweep away the Buendías and the order they represent". A well-known socialist, the ending to One Hundred Years of Solitude could be a wishful prediction by García Márquez regarding the future of Latin America.
Literary significance, reception and recognition
One Hundred Years of Solitude has received universal recognition. The novel has been awarded Italy’s Chianciano Award, France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger, Venezuela’s Romulo Gallegos Prize, and the Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize for Literature. García Márquez also received an honorary LL.D. from Columbia University in New York City. These awards set the stage for García Márquez’s 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.
García Márquez is said to have a gift for blending the everyday with the miraculous, the historical with the fabulous, and psychological realism with surreal flights of fancy. It is a revolutionary novel that provides a looking glass into the thoughts and beliefs of its author, who chose to give a literary voice to Latin America: "A Latin America which neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration." Gabriel García Márquez
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Márquez addressed the significance of his writing and proposed its role to be more than just literary expression: "I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude"
* In 1970, reviewing the book in the National Observer, William Kennedy hailed One Hundred Years of Solitude as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
* The novel topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, according to a survey of international writers commissioned by the global literary journal Wasafiri as a part of its 25th anniversary.
According to Antonio Sacoto, professor at The City College of the City University of New York, One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered as one of the five key novels in Hispanic American literature. (Together with El señor Presidente, Pedro Páramo, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, y La ciudad los perros). These novels, representative of the boom allowed Hispanic American literature to reach the quality of North American and European literature in terms of technical quality, rich themes, and linguistic innovations, among other attributes.
Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, Garcia Marquez is able to define clear themes while maintaining individual character identities, and using different narrative techniques such as third person narrators, specific point of view narrators, and streams of consciousness. Cinematographic techniques are also employed in the novel, with the idea of the montage and the close-up, which effectively combine the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and tragic. Furthermore, political and historical realities are combined with the mythical and magical Latin American world. Lastly, through human comedy the problems of a family, a town, and a country are unveiled. This is all presented through Garcia Marquez’s unique form of narration, which causes the novel to never cease being at its most interesting point.
The characters in the novel are never defined; they are not created from a mold. Instead, they are developed and formed throughout the novel. All characters are individualized, with many characteristics that differentiate them from others.. Ultimately, the novel has a rich imagination achieved by its rhythmic tone, narrative technique, and fascinating character creation, making it a thematic quarry, where the trivial and anecdotal and the historic and political are combined. (260)
Criticisms
Style
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have both received many critical criticisms and reviews. Harold Bloom says “My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb . . . There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it.”
Inspirations
Garcia Marquez has been accused of using many texts as his inspirations for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of these, the most well-known is Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha David T. Haberly alleges that “strong cases have been made for Faulkner, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, and Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and one which has not been mentioned is Chateaubriand’s Atala.” Hopkins backs his statement with evidence that Atala was available for Spanish-speaking audiences before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and makes comparisons between the plot of the two stories and some of the characters.
Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes
Critics have also speculated the potential of Marquez harboring ideals of marianismo, adhering to sexist stereotypes, and reinforcing these stereotypes and sexist attitudes in Cien Anos de Soledad through his portrayal of female characters as domestic housewives. This potentially sexist view also can be viewed as Marquez’s profound reflection on the social and cultural realities that exist in Latin America in terms of how women were viewed, and in particular, in Colombia. “What sort of values does Ursula symbolize? They are these: middle class stinginess, stupidity, superstition, insanity, reactionary activism, etc.” “There are numerous episodes and statements in the book which reinforce the patriarchical values of the story” . “One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the traditional Latin American role of women as adjuncts to men and implies neither qualitative awareness nor literary criticism of the restrictive political and economic systems and notions (ie marianismo) that perpetuate such notions. As a whole, the women of Macondo are pictured as male-defined, biological reproducers or sexually pleasing objects who are treated thematically as accessories to the men who actually shape and control the world.”
McOndo Movement
The portrayal of Latin American culture and society in One Hundred Years of Solitude has been a point of criticism as well. It has been said that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has created a work in which Western audiences portray popular Latin American culture as a primitive society, lacking in technology, and as a region on the world which has been excluded from the effects of globalization. One group movement that speaks out against this portrayal of Latin America as a primitive society is the McOndo movement. McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks away from the long-dominant magical realist literary tradition by strongly associating itself with mass media culture . McOndo attempts to contextualize being Latin American in a world dominated by American pop culture . The movement challenges the natural or rural, magical world typically depicted by the Magical Realism genre .
The work McOndo, by editors Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez, critiques the re-emphasis of the primitive stereotypes of Latin America in One Hundred Years of Solitude. They say “Nuestro McOndo es tan latinoamericano y magico (exotico) como el Macondo real (que, a todo esto no es real sin virtual). Nuestro pais McOndo es mas grande, sobrepoblado y lleno de contaminacion, con autopistas, metro, TV-cable y barriadas. En McOndo hay McDonald’s, computadores Mac y condominios, amen de hotels cinco estrellas construidos con dinero lavando y malls gigantescos” , roughly translated to say “Our McOndo is just as Latin American as the magic (exotic) as the real Macondo (which isn’t real so much as virtual). Our country McOndo is bigger, densely populated and full on contamination, with highways, public transit, cable TV and neighborhoods. In McOndo there are McDonald’s, Mac computers and condominiums, as well as five-star hotels built with clean money and gigantic malls” . He aims to denounce the primitive nature of Garcia Marquez’s Macondo and contrast it with the new McOndo, the metaphorical Latin America we now know after the effects of globalization and corporatization. “Now, thanks to Fuguet and his peers, there is a new voice south of the Rio Grande. It is savvy, street-smart, sometimes wiseass and un-ashamedly over the top. Fuguet calls this the voice of McOndo--a blend of McDonald's, Macintosh computers and condos. The label is a spoof, of course, not only on Garcia Marquez's fictitious village but also on all the poseurs who have turned these latitudes into a pastel tequila ad. ¡Hola! Fuguet is saying. Latin America is no paradise” .
Internal references
In the novel's final chapter, Márquez references the novel Hopscotch (Spanish: Rayuela) by Julio Cortázar in the following line: "...in the room that smelled of boiled cauliflower where Rocamadour was to die" (p. 412). Rocamadour is a fictional character in Hopscotch who indeed dies in the room described. He also references two other major works by Latin American writers in the novel: The Death of Artemio Cruz (Spanish: La Muerte de Artemio Cruz) by Carlos Fuentes and Explosion in a Cathedral (Spanish: El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier.
Adaptations
* Shuji Terayama's play One Hundred Years of Solitude (百年の孤独, originally performed by the Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe), as well as his film Farewell to the Ark (さらば箱舟) are loose (and not officially authorized) adaptations of the novel by García Marquez transplanted into the realm of Japanese culture and history.
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has had such a big impact on the literature world, and although this novel is the author's best selling and most translated around the world, there have been no movies produced about it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has never agreed to sell the rights for producing such film, even though his novel has inspired many to write and has more than enough themes to work on in the film industry.
片名：Love in the Time of Cholera
译名：霍乱时期的爱情
导演：迈克·内威尔 Mike Newell
主演：贾维尔·巴尔登 Javier Bardem
萨尔韦托·巴萨尔Salvatore Basile
本杰明·布拉特 Benjamin Bratt
类型：剧情/浪漫
片长：--
级别：美国R（性内容，裸体及粗口）
发行：新线New Line Cinema
上映日期：2007年11月16 日(美国)
IMDB 评分：8.2/10 (79 votes)
官网：http://www.loveinthetime.com
推荐指数：★★★
《霍乱时期的爱情》-概述
《霍乱时期的爱情》讲述了一段发生在19世纪末至20世纪初的南美洲的爱情故事。书中的名言是：“对于死亡，我感到的唯一痛苦是没能为爱而死”。
《霍乱时期的爱情》-内容简介
影片所讲述的故事发生在19世纪末至20世纪，整个横跨50多年的时间历程。故事发生的地点是哥伦比亚的喀他基纳，那个纷繁复杂，充满魔力与诱惑的南美小城。在这里，上演着一个男人执著一生守候他终生所爱的爱情史诗。
菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎是当地的一个电报职员同时他也是一个多产的诗人，帅气的外表和浪漫的气质让他别具一种诗人的风雅魅力。和所有诗人一样，多愁善感也是阿瑞扎最显著的性格标签。
当偶然透过一座别墅的小窗望到美丽的姑娘弗敏娜·达拉时，阿瑞扎知道自己邂逅了这一生的所爱。于是，他开始用书信向弗敏娜·达拉表达他心中的挚爱。弗敏娜·达拉也逐渐的被菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎的文字所打动。可就在两人要坠入爱河的时候，弗敏娜·达拉的父亲知道了他们两人的关系并为之大为震怒。他发誓要永远的让他们分开。
许多年过去了，弗敏娜·达拉已经成为了贵族子弟鄂毕诺的妻子。当一场突如其来的霍乱袭击喀他基纳的时候，鄂毕诺成为了抵抗瘟疫的中坚力量，为城市带来了大量的药品。为躲避霍乱，鄂毕诺将弗敏娜·达拉送去了法国居住，几年后又将她接回了喀他基纳。这个时候，弗敏娜·达拉已经变成了一个拥有荣华富贵的贵妇人，至于她那场半路夭折的初恋早已被她抛在了脑后。
诗人总是感情丰富的。诗人也因此朝三暮四、蜻蜓点水般处处留情，而有些诗人有时也会坚贞不渝、将全部情感倾注于一人。菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎很不幸的成为了后者。多年过去，他已经不再是当初那个囊中羞涩的小帅。如今的他拥有着自己的事业和财富，还有一堆用以派遣寂寞的女人们，但他还是对弗敏娜·达拉念念不忘。他愿意等待终生，只为了能和弗敏娜·达拉重新开始……
《霍乱时期的爱情》-作者简介
马尔克斯曾于1982年凭长篇小说《百年孤独》获得诺贝尔文学奖。《霍乱时期的爱情》是他于1985年完成的又一部长篇小说。
现年63岁的纽厄尔在执导《哈4》之前，曾执导《四个婚礼和一个葬礼》等著名影片。他称赞《霍乱时期的爱情》是一部伟大的爱情小说，讲述了一个“世界上最浪漫的爱情故事。”
《霍乱时期的爱情》-幕后花絮
本片剧本根据诺贝尔文学奖得主加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯(Gabriel García Márquez)1985年出版的同名小说改编而成。小说本身是马尔克斯的代表作之一，《百年孤独》则是他另外一部家喻户晓的成名作品。几十年来，马尔克斯的作品虽然也屡次被各国的导演翻拍成各种语言的版本搬上银幕，但这还是他首次与好莱坞进行合作。倒不是好莱坞怠慢了这个诺贝尔文学奖大师，只是和许多搞文艺创作的人一样，加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯也属于那种极端厌恶商业化运作却不得不栖身于这个商业时代的矛盾体。他们追求高雅的艺术，对于滥俗的娱乐原本只是泾渭分明、井水不犯河水，但如今娱乐却越来越一发不可收拾的大行其道，将他们所坚持的艺术正统反而挤压到了文化的边缘地带，于是从漠不关心到嗤之以鼻再到不共戴天，加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯也是一个时代造就的反商业主义。而好莱坞自然是当今世界上最大的商业贴牌，几乎所有关于艺术商业化的讨论最后都要把好莱坞牵扯出来说事。所以，好莱坞在老人那吃了这么多年的闭门羹也在情理之中。据说平均每年来找加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯交涉书本影片改编权的厂商有50家之多，而他们几乎无一得逞。这一次新线也是花了大力气才从老人手上用100万美元买到了小说的版权。艰难的攻坚外交过程几乎持续了一年，新线方的制作人用程门立雪般的执著和“绝对不会将影片好莱坞化(hollywoodize)”的承诺才感动了加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯如愿以偿的拿到了版权。
如此费尽心机所取得的剧本，新线方自然是倍加珍视。事实上，本片也是新线今年打造的申奥种子选手，按新线方的如意算盘，本片和12月即将上映的《黑暗物质》在奥斯卡80盛宴上双剑合璧，将商业豪华巨制与文艺内涵两大导向类型的风头尽收囊中。不过，今年的奥斯卡可谓是风起云涌好片不断的一年，各类型片中均有枪眼之作。与本片同场较劲的就有《爱情盛宴》，《狮入羊口》，《婚礼上的玛戈》还有回归的老柯波拉所呈现的《没有青春的青春》等等一干名将佳作。于是，新线在制作本片时也毫不怠慢的请来了各路一线好手。
对于一个改编翻拍的影片来说，剧本改编的质量是决定影片质量的首要因素。所以，点将时一般角色根本不予以考虑。最后，新线请出了当年凭借《钢琴家》(pianist)夺得奥斯卡最佳改编剧本的七旬老将罗纳德·哈伍德(Ronald Harwood)主刀本片剧本。罗纳德·哈伍德在好莱坞接活一向标准极高，而这次相中《霍乱时期的爱情》显然也是冲着诺贝尔奖得主的名头去的。这么一来两位在各自领域获过最高殊荣的大师联手合作，影片剧本质量自然也能不负众望。导演方面，迈克·内威尔则是以他轻松大枣《哈里·波特》系列中最高水准的《火焰杯》而声名大震。本片是迈克·内威尔继《火焰杯》之后首次再掌导筒。相信如果他曾经能够很好的把握《哈里·波特》这样的系列魔幻小说的改编翻拍，那么他那些详略得当、轻重分明的镜头语言同样可以让本片闪耀光彩。主演贾维尔·巴尔登拥有着西班牙血统所给赋予他的浪漫与性感，还有着凭借《夜晚降临前》(Before Night Falls)所获得的一次奥斯卡影帝提名，仪表不凡，风度翩翩再加上与影片角色贴切的诗人气质让他成为片中痴情诗人角色的最好代言。
《霍乱时期的爱情》-评论
据说本片在剧情上非常忠实于原著，而如果按照原书的线索拍摄的话，恐怕产出的电影在时空上缭乱的程度会让《21克》都显得直白无奇。影片的中心一直围绕着菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎和弗敏娜·达拉的一分一合，重点在于关于爱情中永恒与道德边界的探讨。从剧本和其他制作背景来看，本片应该会是今年的又一部不俗之作——又一部——不知道是冲着80这个意义非凡的数字还是奥运奥斯卡双奥同年，今年的影人们异常活跃，打造出了一批质量上乘的各种类型电影。这也让明年的奥斯卡愈发的扑朔迷离。不过，从各方面本片都绝对算得上一个大赛的种子选手，至少最佳剧本的提名应该不会落空。
Plot summary
The main female character in the novel, Fermina Daza, is the strong axis around which the story revolves. Fermina easily rejects Florentino Ariza in their youth when she realizes the naïveté of their first romance, and she weds Juvenal Urbino at the age of 21, the "deadline" she had set for herself, ultimately because he seemed to be able to offer security and love to her. Urbino is a medical doctor devoted to science, modernity, and "order and progress." He is committed to the eradication of cholera and to the promotion of public works. He is a rational man whose life is organized precisely and who values his importance and reputation in society to the utmost. He is a herald of progress and modernization.
Urbino's function in the novel is to provide the counterpoint to Florentino Ariza’s archaic, baldly romantic love. Urbino proves in the end not to have been an entirely faithful husband, confessing one affair to Fermina some years into their marriage, and leaving another to be apparently uncovered by Fermina after his death. Though the novel seems to suggest that Urbino's love for Fermina was never as spiritually chaste as Florentino Ariza's was, it also complicates Florentino's devotion by cataloging his many trysts and apparently a few, possibly genuine, loves. By the end of the book, Fermina has recognized a change in Ariza and their love is allowed to blossom in their old age. For most of the novel, their communication is limited to occasional public niceties or uncertain correspondence by letter; not until the end of the book do Fermina and Florentino converse at length.
Other characters
* Lorenzo Daza – Fermina Daza’s father, a greedy mule driver; he despised Florentino and forced them to break up
* Jeremiah de Saint-Amour – The man whose suicide is introduced as the opening to the novel; a photographer and chess-player
* Aunt Escolástica – The woman who attempts to aid Fermina in her early romance with Florentino by delivering their letters for them. She is ultimately sent away by Lorenzo Daza for this.
* Tránsito Ariza – Florentino’s mother
* Hildebranda Sánchez – Fermina’s cousin
* Miss Barbara Lynch – The woman with whom Urbino confesses having an affair
* The Captain – The captain of the riverboat on which Fermina and Florentino ride at the end of the novel
* Leona Cassiani - She starts out as the "personal assistant" to Uncle Leo XII at the R.C.C., the company which Florentino eventually controls. At one point, it is revealed that the two share a deep respect, possibly even love, for each other, but will never actually be together. She has a maternal love for him as a result of his "charity" in rescuing her from the streets and giving her a job
* América Vicuña - 14-year-old girl, who towards the end of the novel is sent to live with Florentino; he is her guardian while she is in school. They have a sexual relationship, and upon failing her exams because of her love of Florentino, she kills herself. Her suicide illustrates the selfish nature of Florentino's love for Fermina.
Setting
The story takes place in an unnamed port city somewhere in the Caribbean, near the Magdalena River. While the city remains unnamed throughout the novel, descriptions of it led one to the conclusion that it must be Cartagena, in Bolívar, Colombia, where García Márquez spent his early years. The city is divided into such sections as "The District of the Viceroys" and "The Arcade of the Scribes." The novel encompasses the half-century roughly between 1880 and 1930. The city’s "steamy and sleepy streets, rat-infested sewers, old slave quarter, decaying colonial architecture, and multifarious inhabitants" dot the text and mingle amid the lives of the characters. Locations within the story include:
* The house Fermina shares with her husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino
* The "transient hotel" where Florentino Ariza stays for a short time
* Ariza’s office at the river company
* The Arcade of the Scribes
* The Magdalena River
Major themes
Narrative as seduction
Some critics choose to view Love in the Time of Cholera as a heart-warming story about the enduring power of true love. Others criticize this view as simple, contending that the author has woven a story so dense that the reader risks falling into its trap of sweetness and simplicity if they do not pay close attention to what is happening. García Márquez himself said in an interview, "you have to be careful not to fall into my trap."
This is manifested in Ariza’s excessively romantic attitude toward life, an attitude which shapes his obsession with Fermina, and his gullibility in trying to retrieve the sunken treasure of a shipwreck. It is also made evident by the fact that society in the story believes that Fermina and Juvenal Urbino are perfectly happy in their marriage, while the reality of the situation is not so ideal. Critic Keith Booker compares Ariza’s position to that of Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, saying that just as Humbert is able to charm the reader into sympathizing with his situation, even though he is a "pervert, a rapist, and a murderer," Ariza is able to garner the reader’s sympathy, even though the reader is persistently reminded of his more sinister exploits.
Narrative as deconstruction
The notion that Marquez's "trap" refers to our temptation to oversimplify and reduce his narrative to an elementary love story is further strengthened by the fact that the novel holds up and examines romantic love in myriad forms, both "ideal" and "depraved", and continually forces the reader to question such ready-made characterizations by introducing elements antithetical to these facile judgments.
Love as an emotional and physical disease
García Márquez's main notion is that lovesickness is a literal illness, a disease comparable to cholera. Ariza suffers from this just as he might suffer from any malady. At one point, he conflates his physical agony with his amorous agony when he vomits after eating flowers in order to imbibe Fermina's scent. In the final chapter, the Captain's declaration of metaphorical plague is another manifestation of this. The term cholera as it is used in Spanish, cólera, can also denote human rage and ire. (The English adjective choleric has the same meaning.) It is this second meaning to the title that manifests itself both on the level of Ariza's hatred for Urbino's marriage to Fermina, as well as the theme of social strife and warfare that serves as a backdrop to the entire story.
Aging and death
Jeremiah Saint-Amour's death inspires Urbino to meditate on his own death, especially the infirmities that accompany it. It is necessary for Fermina and Florentino to transcend not only the difficulties of love, but also the societal view that love is a young person's prerogative (not to mention the physical obstacles that old age brings to physical love).
Suffering for love
Florentino's penchant for high drama as a poet and a lover is portrayed as both ridiculous and serious. He may go to outlandish lengths for love, but in the end the absurdity is ennobling and his suffering has a kind of dignity. He also endures physical pains.
Film adaptation
Stone Village Pictures bought the film rights from the author for US$3 million, and Mike Newell was chosen to direct it with Ronald Harwood writing the script. Filming started in Cartagena, Colombia, in September 2006.
The $50 million film, the first major foreign production shot in the scenic, walled city in twenty years, was released on November 16, 2007, by New Line Cinema. On his own initiative, García Márquez convinced singer Shakira, who hails from the nearby city of Barranquilla, to provide two songs for the film.
译名：霍乱时期的爱情
导演：迈克·内威尔 Mike Newell
主演：贾维尔·巴尔登 Javier Bardem
萨尔韦托·巴萨尔Salvatore Basile
本杰明·布拉特 Benjamin Bratt
类型：剧情/浪漫
片长：--
级别：美国R（性内容，裸体及粗口）
发行：新线New Line Cinema
上映日期：2007年11月16 日(美国)
IMDB 评分：8.2/10 (79 votes)
官网：http://www.loveinthetime.com
推荐指数：★★★
《霍乱时期的爱情》-概述
《霍乱时期的爱情》讲述了一段发生在19世纪末至20世纪初的南美洲的爱情故事。书中的名言是：“对于死亡，我感到的唯一痛苦是没能为爱而死”。
《霍乱时期的爱情》-内容简介
影片所讲述的故事发生在19世纪末至20世纪，整个横跨50多年的时间历程。故事发生的地点是哥伦比亚的喀他基纳，那个纷繁复杂，充满魔力与诱惑的南美小城。在这里，上演着一个男人执著一生守候他终生所爱的爱情史诗。
菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎是当地的一个电报职员同时他也是一个多产的诗人，帅气的外表和浪漫的气质让他别具一种诗人的风雅魅力。和所有诗人一样，多愁善感也是阿瑞扎最显著的性格标签。
当偶然透过一座别墅的小窗望到美丽的姑娘弗敏娜·达拉时，阿瑞扎知道自己邂逅了这一生的所爱。于是，他开始用书信向弗敏娜·达拉表达他心中的挚爱。弗敏娜·达拉也逐渐的被菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎的文字所打动。可就在两人要坠入爱河的时候，弗敏娜·达拉的父亲知道了他们两人的关系并为之大为震怒。他发誓要永远的让他们分开。
许多年过去了，弗敏娜·达拉已经成为了贵族子弟鄂毕诺的妻子。当一场突如其来的霍乱袭击喀他基纳的时候，鄂毕诺成为了抵抗瘟疫的中坚力量，为城市带来了大量的药品。为躲避霍乱，鄂毕诺将弗敏娜·达拉送去了法国居住，几年后又将她接回了喀他基纳。这个时候，弗敏娜·达拉已经变成了一个拥有荣华富贵的贵妇人，至于她那场半路夭折的初恋早已被她抛在了脑后。
诗人总是感情丰富的。诗人也因此朝三暮四、蜻蜓点水般处处留情，而有些诗人有时也会坚贞不渝、将全部情感倾注于一人。菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎很不幸的成为了后者。多年过去，他已经不再是当初那个囊中羞涩的小帅。如今的他拥有着自己的事业和财富，还有一堆用以派遣寂寞的女人们，但他还是对弗敏娜·达拉念念不忘。他愿意等待终生，只为了能和弗敏娜·达拉重新开始……
《霍乱时期的爱情》-作者简介
马尔克斯曾于1982年凭长篇小说《百年孤独》获得诺贝尔文学奖。《霍乱时期的爱情》是他于1985年完成的又一部长篇小说。
现年63岁的纽厄尔在执导《哈4》之前，曾执导《四个婚礼和一个葬礼》等著名影片。他称赞《霍乱时期的爱情》是一部伟大的爱情小说，讲述了一个“世界上最浪漫的爱情故事。”
《霍乱时期的爱情》-幕后花絮
本片剧本根据诺贝尔文学奖得主加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯(Gabriel García Márquez)1985年出版的同名小说改编而成。小说本身是马尔克斯的代表作之一，《百年孤独》则是他另外一部家喻户晓的成名作品。几十年来，马尔克斯的作品虽然也屡次被各国的导演翻拍成各种语言的版本搬上银幕，但这还是他首次与好莱坞进行合作。倒不是好莱坞怠慢了这个诺贝尔文学奖大师，只是和许多搞文艺创作的人一样，加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯也属于那种极端厌恶商业化运作却不得不栖身于这个商业时代的矛盾体。他们追求高雅的艺术，对于滥俗的娱乐原本只是泾渭分明、井水不犯河水，但如今娱乐却越来越一发不可收拾的大行其道，将他们所坚持的艺术正统反而挤压到了文化的边缘地带，于是从漠不关心到嗤之以鼻再到不共戴天，加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯也是一个时代造就的反商业主义。而好莱坞自然是当今世界上最大的商业贴牌，几乎所有关于艺术商业化的讨论最后都要把好莱坞牵扯出来说事。所以，好莱坞在老人那吃了这么多年的闭门羹也在情理之中。据说平均每年来找加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯交涉书本影片改编权的厂商有50家之多，而他们几乎无一得逞。这一次新线也是花了大力气才从老人手上用100万美元买到了小说的版权。艰难的攻坚外交过程几乎持续了一年，新线方的制作人用程门立雪般的执著和“绝对不会将影片好莱坞化(hollywoodize)”的承诺才感动了加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯如愿以偿的拿到了版权。
如此费尽心机所取得的剧本，新线方自然是倍加珍视。事实上，本片也是新线今年打造的申奥种子选手，按新线方的如意算盘，本片和12月即将上映的《黑暗物质》在奥斯卡80盛宴上双剑合璧，将商业豪华巨制与文艺内涵两大导向类型的风头尽收囊中。不过，今年的奥斯卡可谓是风起云涌好片不断的一年，各类型片中均有枪眼之作。与本片同场较劲的就有《爱情盛宴》，《狮入羊口》，《婚礼上的玛戈》还有回归的老柯波拉所呈现的《没有青春的青春》等等一干名将佳作。于是，新线在制作本片时也毫不怠慢的请来了各路一线好手。
对于一个改编翻拍的影片来说，剧本改编的质量是决定影片质量的首要因素。所以，点将时一般角色根本不予以考虑。最后，新线请出了当年凭借《钢琴家》(pianist)夺得奥斯卡最佳改编剧本的七旬老将罗纳德·哈伍德(Ronald Harwood)主刀本片剧本。罗纳德·哈伍德在好莱坞接活一向标准极高，而这次相中《霍乱时期的爱情》显然也是冲着诺贝尔奖得主的名头去的。这么一来两位在各自领域获过最高殊荣的大师联手合作，影片剧本质量自然也能不负众望。导演方面，迈克·内威尔则是以他轻松大枣《哈里·波特》系列中最高水准的《火焰杯》而声名大震。本片是迈克·内威尔继《火焰杯》之后首次再掌导筒。相信如果他曾经能够很好的把握《哈里·波特》这样的系列魔幻小说的改编翻拍，那么他那些详略得当、轻重分明的镜头语言同样可以让本片闪耀光彩。主演贾维尔·巴尔登拥有着西班牙血统所给赋予他的浪漫与性感，还有着凭借《夜晚降临前》(Before Night Falls)所获得的一次奥斯卡影帝提名，仪表不凡，风度翩翩再加上与影片角色贴切的诗人气质让他成为片中痴情诗人角色的最好代言。
《霍乱时期的爱情》-评论
据说本片在剧情上非常忠实于原著，而如果按照原书的线索拍摄的话，恐怕产出的电影在时空上缭乱的程度会让《21克》都显得直白无奇。影片的中心一直围绕着菲尔伦提诺·阿瑞扎和弗敏娜·达拉的一分一合，重点在于关于爱情中永恒与道德边界的探讨。从剧本和其他制作背景来看，本片应该会是今年的又一部不俗之作——又一部——不知道是冲着80这个意义非凡的数字还是奥运奥斯卡双奥同年，今年的影人们异常活跃，打造出了一批质量上乘的各种类型电影。这也让明年的奥斯卡愈发的扑朔迷离。不过，从各方面本片都绝对算得上一个大赛的种子选手，至少最佳剧本的提名应该不会落空。
Plot summary
The main female character in the novel, Fermina Daza, is the strong axis around which the story revolves. Fermina easily rejects Florentino Ariza in their youth when she realizes the naïveté of their first romance, and she weds Juvenal Urbino at the age of 21, the "deadline" she had set for herself, ultimately because he seemed to be able to offer security and love to her. Urbino is a medical doctor devoted to science, modernity, and "order and progress." He is committed to the eradication of cholera and to the promotion of public works. He is a rational man whose life is organized precisely and who values his importance and reputation in society to the utmost. He is a herald of progress and modernization.
Urbino's function in the novel is to provide the counterpoint to Florentino Ariza’s archaic, baldly romantic love. Urbino proves in the end not to have been an entirely faithful husband, confessing one affair to Fermina some years into their marriage, and leaving another to be apparently uncovered by Fermina after his death. Though the novel seems to suggest that Urbino's love for Fermina was never as spiritually chaste as Florentino Ariza's was, it also complicates Florentino's devotion by cataloging his many trysts and apparently a few, possibly genuine, loves. By the end of the book, Fermina has recognized a change in Ariza and their love is allowed to blossom in their old age. For most of the novel, their communication is limited to occasional public niceties or uncertain correspondence by letter; not until the end of the book do Fermina and Florentino converse at length.
Other characters
* Lorenzo Daza – Fermina Daza’s father, a greedy mule driver; he despised Florentino and forced them to break up
* Jeremiah de Saint-Amour – The man whose suicide is introduced as the opening to the novel; a photographer and chess-player
* Aunt Escolástica – The woman who attempts to aid Fermina in her early romance with Florentino by delivering their letters for them. She is ultimately sent away by Lorenzo Daza for this.
* Tránsito Ariza – Florentino’s mother
* Hildebranda Sánchez – Fermina’s cousin
* Miss Barbara Lynch – The woman with whom Urbino confesses having an affair
* The Captain – The captain of the riverboat on which Fermina and Florentino ride at the end of the novel
* Leona Cassiani - She starts out as the "personal assistant" to Uncle Leo XII at the R.C.C., the company which Florentino eventually controls. At one point, it is revealed that the two share a deep respect, possibly even love, for each other, but will never actually be together. She has a maternal love for him as a result of his "charity" in rescuing her from the streets and giving her a job
* América Vicuña - 14-year-old girl, who towards the end of the novel is sent to live with Florentino; he is her guardian while she is in school. They have a sexual relationship, and upon failing her exams because of her love of Florentino, she kills herself. Her suicide illustrates the selfish nature of Florentino's love for Fermina.
Setting
The story takes place in an unnamed port city somewhere in the Caribbean, near the Magdalena River. While the city remains unnamed throughout the novel, descriptions of it led one to the conclusion that it must be Cartagena, in Bolívar, Colombia, where García Márquez spent his early years. The city is divided into such sections as "The District of the Viceroys" and "The Arcade of the Scribes." The novel encompasses the half-century roughly between 1880 and 1930. The city’s "steamy and sleepy streets, rat-infested sewers, old slave quarter, decaying colonial architecture, and multifarious inhabitants" dot the text and mingle amid the lives of the characters. Locations within the story include:
* The house Fermina shares with her husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino
* The "transient hotel" where Florentino Ariza stays for a short time
* Ariza’s office at the river company
* The Arcade of the Scribes
* The Magdalena River
Major themes
Narrative as seduction
Some critics choose to view Love in the Time of Cholera as a heart-warming story about the enduring power of true love. Others criticize this view as simple, contending that the author has woven a story so dense that the reader risks falling into its trap of sweetness and simplicity if they do not pay close attention to what is happening. García Márquez himself said in an interview, "you have to be careful not to fall into my trap."
This is manifested in Ariza’s excessively romantic attitude toward life, an attitude which shapes his obsession with Fermina, and his gullibility in trying to retrieve the sunken treasure of a shipwreck. It is also made evident by the fact that society in the story believes that Fermina and Juvenal Urbino are perfectly happy in their marriage, while the reality of the situation is not so ideal. Critic Keith Booker compares Ariza’s position to that of Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, saying that just as Humbert is able to charm the reader into sympathizing with his situation, even though he is a "pervert, a rapist, and a murderer," Ariza is able to garner the reader’s sympathy, even though the reader is persistently reminded of his more sinister exploits.
Narrative as deconstruction
The notion that Marquez's "trap" refers to our temptation to oversimplify and reduce his narrative to an elementary love story is further strengthened by the fact that the novel holds up and examines romantic love in myriad forms, both "ideal" and "depraved", and continually forces the reader to question such ready-made characterizations by introducing elements antithetical to these facile judgments.
Love as an emotional and physical disease
García Márquez's main notion is that lovesickness is a literal illness, a disease comparable to cholera. Ariza suffers from this just as he might suffer from any malady. At one point, he conflates his physical agony with his amorous agony when he vomits after eating flowers in order to imbibe Fermina's scent. In the final chapter, the Captain's declaration of metaphorical plague is another manifestation of this. The term cholera as it is used in Spanish, cólera, can also denote human rage and ire. (The English adjective choleric has the same meaning.) It is this second meaning to the title that manifests itself both on the level of Ariza's hatred for Urbino's marriage to Fermina, as well as the theme of social strife and warfare that serves as a backdrop to the entire story.
Aging and death
Jeremiah Saint-Amour's death inspires Urbino to meditate on his own death, especially the infirmities that accompany it. It is necessary for Fermina and Florentino to transcend not only the difficulties of love, but also the societal view that love is a young person's prerogative (not to mention the physical obstacles that old age brings to physical love).
Suffering for love
Florentino's penchant for high drama as a poet and a lover is portrayed as both ridiculous and serious. He may go to outlandish lengths for love, but in the end the absurdity is ennobling and his suffering has a kind of dignity. He also endures physical pains.
Film adaptation
Stone Village Pictures bought the film rights from the author for US$3 million, and Mike Newell was chosen to direct it with Ronald Harwood writing the script. Filming started in Cartagena, Colombia, in September 2006.
The $50 million film, the first major foreign production shot in the scenic, walled city in twenty years, was released on November 16, 2007, by New Line Cinema. On his own initiative, García Márquez convinced singer Shakira, who hails from the nearby city of Barranquilla, to provide two songs for the film.