one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcía

This world is unconstrained by conventional ideas about physics and reality.īut another thing García Márquez learned from Kafka was that however twisted his ideas might be, his narrative voice should be straightforward. We are told of a hen who “laid a hundred golden eggs” and see magnets that can start nails and screws straining to leave beams and furniture. We hear – accurate – premonitions of the future. In the first chapter we meet a man who grows old and then young again. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of the expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman’s hair around its neck.Kafka’s influence is clear throughout the rest of the novel, García Márquez taking the idea that anything can happen and running with it. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades’ incantation aloud. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea.

“Very soon we’ll have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house,” her husband replied. Úrsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: “It won’t work for that.” But José Arcadio Buendía at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. “Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons. The train that brings outside civilization-foreign progress, foreign wonders, and foreign trouble-to Macondo.Ī heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia.

One hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcía