Word: macondo
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...only novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a seismic literary event in Latin America when first published in 1967. Translated three years later, it received awestruck notices in the U.S., and has continued to attract not so much readers as proselytizers. The chronicle of an enchanted town called Macondo, it is a "good read" in the Dickensian sense: it has abundant life, a tangle of characters and plots, all supported by a clear moral viewpoint...
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...
...huge, U.S.-owned banana plantation gradually penetrate the town's isolation and open it to dissension and prosperity. Six generations of Buendias, all touched with fantasy and fatalism, all condemned to fundamental solitude, are born and die, often violently. Just before the family line ends in disaster, Macondo is almost abandoned, the banana farms destroyed by nearly five years of rain. Only the red-light district remains active. Finally, an inexplicable cyclone erases the town and the family...
Indeed, the whole enchanted continent, 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...
...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 has been fulfilled, including the final, devastating wind that takes apart Macondo. The future is thus history, the end is the beginning, and the reader is tempted to start again...