Situations

It would be absurd, and horribly dull, to try to summarize One Hundred Years of Solitude, except as a rambling joke. ‘I merely wanted’., García Márquez said to Rita Guibert, ‘to tell the story of a family who for a hundred years did everything they could in order not to have a son with a pig's tail, and … ended up having one.’ This is a good joke because the pig's tail is both much worried about and really a diversion. It is what the family is afraid of, and what a waits it. But between the fear and its fulfilment the whole novel takes place, and most characters don't think about the pig's tail at all. It is a lure, an instance of what Roland Barthes called ‘a narrative enigma’. Well, it is also a sign of incest, but that is a lure too, since the incest in the book, although always hovering, is mainly metaphorical or merely flirted with.

Still, summaries apart, we do need a means of holding the book in our minds, and we see at once that it is indeed ‘the story of a family’, the prodigious Buendías; and even more the story of a place, the human geography of the family's fortunes.

José Arcadio Buendía, with whom our story begins, is described as a young patriarch, and might be said to go even further back into the Bible, since he is the first citizen of a sort of paradise.