[8][9][10][11] The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon[12] and in world literature.

A decorated veteran of the Thousand Days' War, Ricardo Márquez's accounts of the rebellion against the conservative Colombian government led his grandson to a socialist outlook.

[10] Soon after its founding, Macondo became a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events that involve the generations of the Buendía family, who are unable or unwilling to escape their periodic (mostly self-inflicted) misfortunes.

For years the town has been solitary and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of a band of Gypsies, who show the townspeople scientific discoveries such as magnets, telescopes, and ice.

He becomes an iconic revolutionary leader, fighting for many years and surviving multiple attempts on his life, but ultimately tires of war and signs a peace treaty with the Conservatives.

"Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities.

"[19] In this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive that narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press.

"[16] The use of particular historic events and characters renders the book an exemplary work of magical realism, wherein the novel compresses decades of cause and effect whilst telling an interesting story.

[21] He eventually leaves the family after being molested by Pilar Ternera to chase a Gypsy girl and unexpectedly returns many years later as an enormous man covered in tattoos, claiming that he has sailed the seas of the world.

José Arcadio plans to set Aureliano up in a business and return to Rome, but is murdered in his bath by four of the adolescent boys who ransack his house and steal his gold.

"...Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: 'The first in line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants'."

When José Arcadio Segundo helps arrange a workers' strike on the plantation, the company traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them down in the town square.

[10] The selfishness of the Buendía family is eventually broken by the once superficial Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, who discover a sense of mutual solidarity and the joy of helping others in need during Macondo's economic crisis.

Although the story can be read as a linear progression of events, both when considering individual lives and Macondo's history, García Márquez allows room for several other interpretations of time: Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

Gabriel García Márquez shows his criticism of the Latin American elite through the stories of the members of a high-status family who are essentially in love with themselves, to the point of being unable to understand the mistakes of their past and learn from them.

[33] In Colombia, where the novel takes place, a Big House was known for being a grand one-story dwelling with many bedrooms, parlors, a kitchen, a pantry and a veranda, all areas of the Buendía household mentioned throughout the book.

The novel topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, according to a survey of international writers commissioned by the global literary journal Wasafiri as a part of its 25th-anniversary celebration.

Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda called it "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes", while John Leonard in The New York Times wrote that "with a single bound, Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov.

A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune.

Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.

[35]Harold Bloom remarked, "My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb...

"[36] David Haberly has argued that García Márquez may have borrowed themes from several works, such as William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and Chateaubriand's Atala, in an example of intertextuality.

[37] In 2017, Chilean artist Luisa Rivera illustrated a fiftieth anniversary special edition of the book published by Penguin Random House Group Editorial, Spain.

These events include the inclusion of the Roma "Gypsies", the Liberal political reformation of a colonial way of life, and the 19th-century arguments for and against it; the arrival of the railway to a mountainous country; the Thousand Days' War (Guerra de los Mil Días, 1899–1902); the corporate hegemony of the United Fruit Company ("American Fruit Company" in the story); the cinema; the automobile; and the military massacre of striking workers as government–labour relations policy.

Led by a man named Melquíades, the Roma bring new discoveries and technology to the isolated village of Macondo, often inciting the curiosity of José Arcadio Buendía.

Banana plantation workers had been striking against the United Fruit Company to earn better labor conditions when members of the local military fired guns into crowds.

"[41] In the novel's account of the civil war and subsequent peace, there are numerous mentions of the pensions not arriving for the veterans, a reference to one of García Márquez's earlier works, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba.

[citation needed] Shūji Terayama's play One Hundred Years of Solitude (百年の孤独, originally performed by the Tenjō Sajiki theater troupe) and his film Farewell to the Ark (さらば箱舟) are loose (and unauthorized) adaptations of the novel transplanted into the realm of Japanese culture and history.

[42][43][44] On October 21, 2022, Netflix commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the announcement of García Márquez's Nobel Prize in Literature with an exclusive preview of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

[45] On the tenth anniversary of García Márquez's death, Netflix released the official teaser for One Hundred Years of Solitude and revealed that the series will run for sixteen episodes.