Novels
One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
The story chronicles several generations of the Buendía family from the time they found the fictional South American village Macondo through their trials and tribulations, instances of incest, births, and deaths. The history of Macondo is often generalized by critics to represent rural towns throughout Latin America or at least near García Márquez's native Aracatac.
One of the 20th century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize winning career.
Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human.
Since García Márquez was eighteen, he had wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents' house where he grew up. However, he struggled with finding an appropriate tone and put off the idea until one day the answer hit him while driving his family to Acapulco. He turned the car around and the family returned home so he could begin writing. He sold his car so his family would have money to live off of while he wrote, but writing the novel took far longer than he expected, he wrote everyday for eighteen months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and their baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord. Fortunately, when the book was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel.
Of Love and Other Demons (1994)
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, a startling new novel - the story of a doomed love affair between an unruly copper-haired girl and the bookish priest sent to oversee her exorcism.
Of Love and Other Demons is set in a South American seaport in the colonial era, a time of viceroys and bishops, enlightened men and Inquisitors, saints and lepers and pirates. Sierva Maria, only child of a decaying noble family, has been raised in the slaves’ courtyard of her father’s cobwebbed mansion while her mother succumbs to fermented honey and cacao on a faraway plantation. On her twelfth birthday the girl is bitten by a rabid dog, and even as the wound is healing she is made to endure therapies indistinguishable from tortures. Believed, finally, to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, the Bishop’s protege, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train; who is already moved by this kicking, spitting, emaciated creature strapped to a stone bed. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, breathing gently on her chafed skin to cool it, feeding her smuggled pastries, Delaura feels “something immense and irreparable” happening to him. It is love, “the most terrible demon of all.” And it is not long before Sierva Maria, though dreaming of snow, joins in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons haunts us with its evocation of an exotic world while it treats, majestically, of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.
