Overall, I think I appreciated "The Fortress of Solitude" more than many (but not all - Brooklynite?) other readers, because of my love of music. As Lethem writes: Remedios was the youngest daughter of the town's Conservative administrator, Don Apolinar Moscote. [17] 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. Until soon before the Colonel's death, her dolls are displayed in his bedroom. a b c d Antonio Sacoto (1979) Cinco novelas claves de la novela hispano americana ( El señor presidente, Pedro Páramo, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, La ciudad y los perros, Cien años de soledad), Eliseo Torres & Sons, New York The novel presents a fictional story in a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characters are fabricated. However, the message that García Márquez intends to deliver explains a true history. García Márquez uses 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. García Márquez'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." [15] Magic realism is inherent in the novel—achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. This magic 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 them. [20]

a b c Elsey, Brenda. “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” History of Latin America 1810-Present. Hofstra University. Adams Hall, Hempstead. 3 March 2020. Lecture. By the novel's end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, with the only remaining Buendías being Amaranta Úrsula and her nephew Aureliano, whose parentage is hidden by his grandmother Fernanda, and he and Amaranta Úrsula unknowingly begin an incestuous relationship. They have a child who bears the tail of a pig, fulfilling the lifelong fear of the long-dead matriarch Úrsula. Amaranta Úrsula dies in childbirth and the child is devoured by ants, leaving Aureliano as the last member of the family. He decodes an encryption Melquíades had left behind in a manuscript generations ago. The secret message informs the recipient of every fortune and misfortune that the Buendía family's generations lived through. As Aureliano reads the manuscript, he feels a windstorm starting around him, and he reads in the document that the Buendía family is doomed to be wiped from the face of the Earth because of it. In the last sentence of the book, the narrator describes Aureliano reading this last line just as the entire town of Macondo is scoured from existence. [12] The Buendía family tree. Symbolism and metaphors [ edit ] Iguarán is the matriarch of the Buendía family and is wife and cousin to José Arcadio Buendía. [17] She lives to be well over 100 years old and she oversees the Buendía household through six of the seven generations documented in the novel. She has a business of making candy animals and pastries which she continues until the arrival of Fernanda. She exhibits a very strong character and often succeeds where the men of her family fail, for example finding a route to the outside world from Macondo. She deeply fears her family resuming their incestuous practices as her inbred relatives tended to have animalistic features. From a strong and active matriarch, Úrsula is reduced to a plaything for Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano in her last years and shrinks to the size of a newborn baby when she finally dies.Es una de esas novelas que uno quisiera que fuesen interminables, que a pesar de sus más de seiscientas páginas en edición de bolsillo se termina con pena, como esa infancia que queríamos apurar a toda prisa, una página tras otra, mientras duró y que después supo a demasiado poco. Fernanda comes from a ruined, aristocratic family that kept her isolated from the world. [17] She was chosen as the most beautiful of 5,000 girls. She is brought to Macondo to compete with Remedios the Beauty for the title of Queen of the local carnival; however, her appearance turns the carnival into a bloody confrontation. After the fiasco, she marries Aureliano Segundo, who despite this maintains a domestic relation with his concubine, Petra Cotes. Nevertheless, she 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 her husband dies, taking care of the household until her death. This middle space, this human dream is a "bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream," a Watermelon Sugar like the one celebrated (if not invented) by Richard Brautigan (to which Dylan's mother, Rachel, had once retreated from Brooklyn). Fernanda is never accepted by anyone in the Buendía household for they 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 Meme's son Aureliano, whom she tries to isolate from the world.

The Thousand Days War in Colombia was fought between Liberals and Conservatives from 1899 to 1902. The Conservatives had been "in control more or less constantly since 1867," and the Liberals, mainly coffee plantation owners and workers who had been excluded from representation, sparked a revolution in October 1899. [33] The fighting continued for a few years, and it is estimated that over 130,000 lives were lost. Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) Because Macondo is a fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez, the exact events of the Thousand Days' War as they occurred in the book are fictional. However, these events are widely considered to be metaphorical for the Thousand Days War as experienced by the entire country of Colombia. Este impresionante ejercicio de creatividad y fuerza narrativa es, en definitiva, un réquiem por la infancia, por la inocencia, por los amigos que equivocaron el camino y se perdieron y también por aquéllos que siguieron con paso seguro por la ruta correcta sólo para encontrar que al final les esperaba lo mismo que creyeron abandonar en el punto de salida. En sus páginas se combinan nostalgia y desencanto en la misma medida en que lo hacen en nuestros propios recuerdos.Kiely, Robert (March 8, 1970). "Memory and Prophecy, Illusion and Reality Are Mixed and Made to Look the Same". Books. The New York Times. This remark is Mr Thwaites' way of referring to Russian victories on the eastern front. He himself was an admirer of Hitler before the war, and is rabidly opposed to communism; the success of the Russian armies in the Allied cause is therefore a source of displeasure to him, though he dare not admit as much, so he seeks to dissociate himself from it by gratuitously associating the Russians with Miss Roach, while at the same time devaluing it by the dismissive phrase, "as usual". Miss Roach attempts to counter this move, which she understands very well, by remaining silent, but Mr Thwaites insists on repeating it, so the code of polite conversation forces her to reply, first by pretending not to understand: "Who're my friends?""Your Russian friends," says Thwaites. "They're not my friends," says Miss Roach, "any more than anybody else." And when Mrs Barratt, who shares the table, comes to her support by saying, "You must admit they're putting up a wonderful fight, Mr Thwaites", he replies, "Oh yes ... They're putting up a fight all right."