Magical Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez said that everything he wrote is drawn from the first eight years of his life, a period when he lived with his maternal grandparents. His grandmother was a storyteller whose superstitions, legends, and realistic tone provided him with much source material. His grandfather, a veteran of the civil wars that had shaken Colombia over the years, gave García Márquez a foundation for the many wars fought by Colonel Aureliano Buendía. The town where his grandparents lived, Aracateca, served as a model for Macondo; in fact, “Macondo” was the name of a nearby banana plantation. The massacre described in his book was also nearby and actually occurred in 1928, the year he was born.

At the age of eight, García Márquez left Aracateca to rejoin his parents and they then sent him to boarding school. At twelve he won a scholarship to a Jesuit high school in Bogotá, where he showed his love of literature, stories, and drawing; however, upon graduation, he followed his parents’ wishes and began the study of law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá. He loathed law school, however, and began instead to write short stories, a number of which were published; he also used the time to catch up on his reading of both modern literature and the classics. He felt liberated by Kafka’s Metamorphosis and was particularly influenced by Faulkner’s creation of the world of Yoknapatawpha County.

García Márquez finally dropped out of law school to take a position as a writer for a Colombian newspaper. When he wrote an exposé that annoyed the government, the paper sent him to cover a story in Europe. He parlayed this assignment into a role as a foreign correspondent and roamed Europe as a journalist; he later said that this journalistic training was extremely important in shaping his fiction writing. Eventually his career took him to Cuba to cover the revolution there. He became friends with Fidel Castro and flirted with socialism himself. Although some of his writing was published, he was not a great success.

Then, in 1965, García Márquez revisited his hometown and felt an inspiration. He wrote daily for eighteen months, almost bankrupting his family, and finally finished One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel was an immediate success, becoming one of the most popular works of magical realism, selling half a million copies in a few years. García Márquez once said that he tried to tap “the magic in commonplace events.”

Magical realism, for which García Márquez has been rightly acclaimed, has been defined by many critics. However, there is still much disagreement about its meaning. English-speaking critics tend to place emphasis on the magical elements, while Spanish-speakers tend to stress the reality that underlies the novel. García Márquez himself defended the latter view when he articulated Latin America’s “outsized reality” in his Nobel Prize in Literature (1982) lecture, “The Solitude of Latin America.”

García Márquez continued to write, moved to Mexico, and began to support numerous leftist causes with the proceeds of his books. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He continued to write and teach for many years; his death in 2014 was mourned throughout the world.