Cien años de soledad

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II. Literary Genre: The Novel

4. How do elements of irony work in the novel?

Gabriel García Márquez. Cien años de soledad. (1967, Colombia)

Key Terms (tags): magical realism, novel, the boom, irony

Supporting References:

1. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cien_a%C3%B1os_de_soledad

2. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/solitude/
3. Blog summary: http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/reportaje/garcia_marquez/cien_anos.htm
4. magical realism: http://www.mundolatino.org/cultura/garciamarquez/ggm4.htm
5. Summaryhttp://literatura.about.com/od/Cienanosdesoledad/a/Argumento-De-Cien-Anos-De-Soledad.htm
6. tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/100-years-of-solitude
7. “Reality and Myth in García Márquez' "Cien años de soledad"” - Jstor www.jstor.org/stable/1346518
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9. Buchanan, Ian. "magical realism." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013 .

“A style of literature which integrates a realist mode of writing with fantastical or marvellous events treated as perfectly ordinary occurrences. The term derives from a mistranslation of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's notion ‘lo real maravilloso’ (marvellous reality), which occurs in the prologue to El Reino de este Mundo (1949), translated as The Kingdom of This World (1957), where it is used to characterize the life of the people Carpentier encountered on a visit to Haiti. The key here is that the aim is to describe a reality in which the magical is part of everyday life and not an extraordinary dimension. Thus, it should not be confused with either the fantastic (as Tzvetan *Todorov defines it) or fantasy fiction, because its purpose is not simply to go beyond the bounds of realism. As is evident in the best-known examples of magical realism, namely Gabriel García Márquez's novel, Cien años de soledad (1967), translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), there is a distinct political purpose behind introducing the marvellous, which sets it apart from the merely fantastic. At its best, as in Márquez and Rushdie, but one can also cite the work of Mikhail Bulgakov, Angela Carter, and Günter Grass, the device of magical realism (as the Russian Formalists would undoubtedly call it) enables the writer to critique belief, memory, and the imagination as historical forces.”

10. Birch, Dinah. "García Márquez, Gabriel." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013 .

The article offers an overview of García Márquez and less a discussion on the above-cited text.

“García Márquez, Gabriel (1927/8– ) Colombian novelist, born in the Caribbean backwater of Aracataca, and a key figure in the Boom. He was educated at the Liceo Nacional at Zipaquirá, near Santa Fe de Bogotá, and never completed his university law degree. After beginning his lifelong journalistic career, he went to Europe for the Liberal Colombian newspaper El espectador and in 1955 published his first novel, La hojarasca (Leaf Storm); it introduces the isolated fictional town of Macondo, which more famously became the setting for his Cien años de soledad (1967: One Hundred Years of Solitude), written in Mexico and recounting the lives of several generations of the Buendía family. In this exuberant, tragicomic novel of magic realism, a style which García Márquez popularized, a deadpan narrator adopts the voice of a rural Caribbean storyteller, relating in closely observed detail a series of plausible and marvellous events which provide a history of Colombia seen from below. The author has long supported the Cuban Revolution; the novel has a strong political dimension. Known primarily as a magic realist, García Márquez's work is in fact constantly experimental, from his realist novella El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1958: No One Writes to the Colonel) to the complex novel of dictatorship El otoño del patriarca (1975: The Autumn of the Patriarch), and the fictional investigation of a murder in Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981: Chronicle of a Death Foretold). In 1985 he published El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera), an examination of love, memory, and old age, in the form of a popular romance. His later work includes El general en su laberinto (1989: The General in his Labyrinth), a re‐creation of Simón Bolívar's final days, Del amor y otros demonios (1994: Of Love and Other Demons), and Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004: Memories of my Melancholy Whores). García Márquez is a master of both the wide‐ranging saga, and the spare short story in which much is left unsaid. He has published several collections of stories, among them Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (1962: Big Mama's Funeral) and Doce cuentos peregrinos (1992: Strange Pilgrims). His work is influenced by writing in English, especially that of William *Faulkner, Ernest *Hemingway, James *Joyce, and Virginia *Woolf, while he has inspired writers like Salman *Rushdie and Angela *Carter. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982; Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), the first volume of his autobiography, appeared in 2002.”

11. "Boom, the." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Birch, Dinah, and Katy Hooper. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2013. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013 .

“Boom, the. A term used loosely to refer to a group of Latin American authors who, in the late 1950s and 1960s, put fiction from the sub‐continent on the international map. The principal writers are Julio Cortázar (Argentina), the Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru). An earlier generation of Latin American writers had already drawn inspiration from European and North American modernist authors like William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, adapting them creatively to their own context, but the Boom authors did so in a way that caught the imagination of a wide readership. Fuentes's novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962: The Death of Artemio Cruz) and Vargas Llosa's La ciudad y los perros (1963: The Time of the Hero) and La casa verde (1966: The Green House) were experimentally realist works which drew upon Faulkner's narrative and structural techniques to depict the complexity and violence of, respectively, Mexico and Peru. Cortázar and García Márquez, while sometimes writing in a realist mode, incorporated fantasy (notably the magical realism of García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967: One Hundred Years of Solitude) to create works that were at the same time ironic meditations on fiction. The Boom writers married experiment, which could make considerable demands upon their readers, with gripping storytelling, humour, and a political edge, rendering their works commercially successful.”