Word: buendia
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Flying Carpets. Outwardly the book is a picaresque saga of the extraordinary Buendia family in Macondo, the town they helped to found more than a century ago in the dense Colombian lowlands. Pioneer settlers from a foothills town, José Arcadio Buendia and Úrsula, his wife-cousin, start with nothing but the vehemence of their blood. They soon make Macondo into a strange oasis in the orchid-filled jungle, a primitive, otherworldly place resonant with songbirds, where there is no death, no crime, no law, no judges. The only outside visitors are gypsies, who astound the residents with magnets...
...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...