Word: buendia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This kind of time is mythic, biblical, fairy tale time. In a mysterious way it preserves instead of oppressing; the men of Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel--not a Buendia among them--are all slaves of a destructive sort of time. The remnants of Aureliano's revolutionary army are tricked into waiting paralyzed for a promised pension that never arrives. The whole town waits for death--the individual or collective crisis that might give them a sense of direction, something to fight against--and when death comes it comes as an anticlimax. The "leaf storm...
...searches in vain for the raffish Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude-modeled on the banana boom town of Aracataca, where the author was born. Macondophiles will at least learn some new bits and pieces about the place. The action starts with a note from Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the great revolutionary warrior who returns in Solitude, and the recluse Rebeca also makes an ectoplasmic appearance...
...Buendia men are introverted, impulsive, richly eccentric. José Arcadio, the founding father, all common sense when it comes to law or town design, is lured into alchemy and other esoteric sciences; he tries to use a daguerreotype machine to find the invisible player of his pianola. One of his sons, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, becomes a revolutionary leader who organizes 32 armed uprisings against a distant and corrupt "government." He loses them all, but wins the war-only to lose the peace. Aureliano II is a roistering spendthrift who takes on all comers in eating contests. He falls only once...
...originally colonized by white men in pursuit of El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, is encapsulated in Macondo. The only trace of the Protestant ethic in the town is the operation of the U.S banana company-and the "gringos" are plainly mean, greedy, and probably crazy too. The Buendias, on the other hand, are inspired mainly by the magic in life. They see no limit of human potential, mostly because natural miracles abound-a plague of insomnia, showers of dead birds or yellow flowers, the arrival of death as a lady in blue. When Remedies Buendia (whose beauty...
...range and length, the book is satisfyingly cohesive where it might be sprawling. The key to this unity is Garcia Márquez's treatment of time. Consider the superb opening sentence: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Such compression of time makes the novel taut with a sense of fate. Atavistic dictates of blood must be followed. Premonitions invariably come true. A series of coded predictions, written when Macondo was still young, are deciphered only when every prediction...