Cent ans de solitude

An epic tale of the founding, greatness, and decline of the village of Macondo and its most illustrious family of pioneers, grappling with the cruel and derisory history of one of those Latin American republics so implausible that they still seem to us to be on the margins of history, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a giant theater where myths give birth to men who in turn give birth to myths, as in Homer, Cervantes, or Rabelais. A universal chronicle of a microcosm isolated from the rest of the world—with its fabulous genesis, the history of its dynasty, its plagues and wars, its constructions and destructions, its apocalypse— a “loop of time” enclosed in a book where the author and the last of his line of characters appear inextricably linked, because of “real events that no one believes in anymore but which had so profoundly affected their lives that they both found themselves adrift on the backwash of a bygone world of which only nostalgia remained.”