One Hundred Years of Solitude - Chapter 1 - Many Years Later

Aug 5, 2026

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Uploaded by Violet

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel opens in Macondo, where the Buendía family’s fortunes begin to turn through astonishing inventions brought by traveling gypsies. Facing years ahead with Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the narrative recalls his father’s search for knowledge, including experiments with magnets and attempts to transform nature into gold. It also shows how new “science” collapses distance, creating wonder, commerce, and conflict.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages201

Reading Time5 h 10 min

AccessFree to download

Chapter 1

Many Years Later

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia in 1928, but he has lived most of his life in Mexico and Europe. He attended the University of Bogotá and later worked as staff reporter and film critic for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. In addition to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. he has also written two collections of short fiction, NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL and LEAF STORM (both available in Bard editions) .

García Márquez currently lives with his wife and children in Barcelona.

Other Avon Bard Books by

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

IN EVIL HOUR

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ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH

BY GREGORY RABASSA

AVON BOOKS – NEW YORK

This book was first published in Argentina in 1967 by Editorial Sudamericana, S.A., Buenos Aires, under the title Cien Años de Soledad. Assistance for the translation of this volume was given by the Center for Inter-American Relations.

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First Avon Bard Printing: May 1971

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Printed in the U.S.A.

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ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

Chapter 1

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that manythings lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A 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. 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 longtime appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons.“Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “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. 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 hon

FAQs

What discovery is made when the magnet idea fails?

His expedition unearths a suit of fifteenth-century armor containing a calcified skeleton and a copper locket with a woman’s hair.

Aug 5, 2026

261

Uploaded by Violet