Is One Hundred Years of Solitude based on a true story? Explained

Yes, Gabrial Garcia Marquez's Spanish-language novel Cien Años de Soledad, popularly known as One Hundred Years of Solitude in English, incorporated some real events from Columbian history, such as the Banana Massacre and the Thousand Days' War.

Netflix released the teaser for the show starring Claudio Cataño, Marco González, Jerónimo Barón, Leonardo Soto, Susana Morales, and Ella Becerra, on April 17, 2024. From the teaser, it looks like the Netflix adaptation has remained true to the source material.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered an exceptional work in literature for combining reality with magical elements. The story follows seven generations of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude portrays true historical events

The firing squad (Image via Netflix)

Published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude narrates the multi-generational saga of the Buendía family, founders of the fictional town of Macondo. The riverside town is said to be inspired by Márquez’s birthplace, Aracataca. Throughout the book, Márquez portrays real events from Columbian history.

The novel draws on Columbia's turbulent history of civil conflicts, including the Thousand Days' War(1889-1902), and the Columbian Civil War (1948-1958). Just like the Thousand Days' War, there is a violent conflict between the Liberals and the Conservatives in Macondo, and the themes of political instability, violence, and power struggles also reflect the period of civil war.

The novel also references the real-life United Fruit Company that set up plantations in Columbia, exploiting natural resources, and the 1928 Banana Massacre, where government forces brutally killed the striking workers in banana plantations, a similar event happened in the novel.

Marquez, while incorporating elements of Columbia's political history, including the rise of military dictatorship and the influence of foreign interventions, also explores the impact of modernization and technological advancements on traditional ways of life.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude as a fictional story

Still from the trailer (Image via Netflix)

The novel begins with José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, leaving their hometown in Riohacha, Colombia, after José Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting José Arcadio was impotent.

In their emigration journey, while camping on a riverbank, José Arcadio dreams of a utopian town and establishing Macondo at the riverside. In the next hundred years, the Buendía lineage would mark the future of this mythical town, tormented by madness, impossible loves, a bloody and absurd war, and the fear of a terrible curse that condemns them, without hope, to one hundred years of solitude.

The past never dies in Macondo and becomes a part of life, like poverty, hunger, and injustice. Over seven generations José Arcadio Buendía and his descendants have their fits of anger and jealousy, their feuds and wars, their nightmares, and the current of cursed s**ual attraction.

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The original novel Cien Años de Soledad, is an exceptional work of magical realism

One Hundred Years of Solitude is an exemplary work of magic realism, a term coined by the German art critic Franz Roh in 1925, describing a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary.

In the beginning of the story when José Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar, the latter comes back as a ghost, and in the end, a baby with a pigtail is born, due to the incestuous nature of consummation.

This violation of natural laws through art is always present in the novel, as bizarre events keep happening in Macondo, but are treated as something normal, and normal events are treated as something extraordinary.

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García Márquez was one of the four central figures in the so-called Latin Boom, which designates the rise in popularity of Latin-American writing in the 1960s and 1970s.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is perhaps the most important, and the most widely read, text to emerge from that period. The teaser got a good response showcasing that the fans are intrigued to see how Netflix adapts the beloved novel.