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Literature: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buend�a was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

— The opening line

"What did you expect?" �rsula sighed. "Time passes."

"That's how it goes," Aureliano admitted, "but not so much."

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 1967 novel, that gave Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez the Nobel Prize. Staple of Spanish-speaking High School curricula everywhere, mostly for being awesomely deep and so goddamn hard to understand. Arguably one of the most important pieces of literature written in the 20th century, or to put in context, almost as important as Don Quixote to Spanish speaking literature. Famous among other things for using every conceivable trope one could ever hope to fit in 28.8 oz of paper.

The book follows the story of the Buend�a family and the town they create, Macondo, a metaphor for Latin America as a whole, from its foundation to its end. Of course, it is told in a non-linear fashion with every generation having the same few names, as well as the same basic attributes (except for a pair of twins whose names are thought to have been accidentally switched at some point, which is why it's so confusing). Alongside the story of the Buendia family, there are an abundance of vignettes recounting both the everyday and the supernatural occurrences that shape the lives of the inhabitants of Macondo. The themes range widely, incorporating legendary figures (such as the Wandering Jew), historical events (Sir.Francis Drake bombing of Rioacha, the Massacre of the Banana growers), and short stories about the love of two minor characters who never get to interfere with the main action. Believe it or not the story takes place in a time span of a hundred years.

Needs More Love.

This book provides examples of:

Anyone Can Die: And in fact, almost everyone does.
All Girls Want Bad Boys: Rebeca with Jos� Arcadio.
Apron Matron: Ursula.
Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Remedios the Beauty, literally.
- It's implied that Melqu�ades does this at one point.
Babies Ever After: Subverted.
Back from the Dead: Melqu�ades. Twice.
Badass Mustache: Colonel Aureliano Buend�a.
Banana Republic - For a while, Macondo is this.
Belligerent Sexual Tension: Mauricio is the Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Meme is the Type B Tsundere. It ends in tragedy.
Big Damn Heroes: Jos� Arcadio saves Colonel Aureliano Buend�a from the firing squad.
Bigger Is Better In Bed: Several people say this about Jos� Arcadio.
A gypsy woman with splendid flesh came in a short time after accompanied by a man who was not of the caravan but who was not from the village either, and they began to undress in front of the bed. Without meaning to, the woman looked at Jos� Arcadio and examined his magnificent animal in repose with a kind of pathetic fervor.
"My boy, she exclaimed, "may God preserve you just as you are."
Big Eater: Aureliano Segundo becomes this, to incredible degrees.
- Subverted with Rebeca: The Buend�as only break her habit of eating dirt and whitewash with a lot of effort, and she'll snap right back whenever overwhelmed or stressed.
Big Fancy House: The Buend�a household gets remodeled and renovated quite a few times as the family becomes more successful. It doesn't last.
Big Screwed-Up Family
Boisterous Bruiser: Jos� Arcadio, post-Walking the Earth. Also, Aureliano Segundo.
Boom Town: Macondo. It goes to the Dying Town phase but never becomes quite a ghost one.
Brick Joke: The last of the 17 sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendi�a being killed.
Broken Bird: Amaranta (starting, but not ending, with her rivalry with Rebeca over Pietro Crespi). Meme after losing Mauricio Babilonia.
Brother-Sister Incest and Parental Incest: Or incest in general. One of the biggest driving plot forces is to keep these from happening. Rebeca and Jos� Arcadio marry, but Rebeca is adopted and a child of distant relatives. Incest happens anyway, in the end, between an aunt and nephew with the same blood. They actually don't know it until the very end, when she's dead and he's the last one standing.
- There's also Aureliano Jos�, who lusts for years after his aunt Amaranta who raised him instead of his father. She reciprocates a little until Ursula almost catchrs them kissing, then goes Oh Crap and refuses to keep up with him.
Building of Adventure: After the rains, when all the action is centered in or around the now-decrepit Buend�a mansion.
Buried Alive - A man condemned to death by fire squad survives and it's implied that he'll be alive when they bury him. This traumatizes Jos� Arcadio the second.
Buried Treasure - The gold inside the Don Jos� statue is buried by �rsula somewhere around the Buend�a house.
Call Back: Jose Arcadio Buend�a discovers a Spanish galleon during one of his expeditions. It shows up every now and then as the generations pass.
Chick Magnet: Pietro Crespi.
City of Adventure: Macondo, your quiet smallish town somewhere in Latin Land.
- AKA Colombian Caribbean
Colonel Badass: Colonel Aureliano Buend�a, of course. Arcadio tries to be this, but it doesn't work.
Control Freak: Fernanda, especially as �rsula loses her eyesight. This ends up with Mauricio Babilonia getting shot and paralyzed, and Meme going silent and being shunted off to a convent for the rest of her life.
Conspicuous Consumption: After becoming successful, Aureliano Segundo parties hard.
Creepy Child: Colonel Aureliano Buend�a was one. He cried in his mom's womb, was born with his eyes open, predicted things as a kid and as a youngster�
- One of the 17 Aurelianos also was like this. He creeped the shit out of Ursula and Amaranta when he came to meet them, walked around the house as if he had been born there, and asked them for a toy that he had never ever sen and somehow he knew that they had it.
Dead Guy Junior: Over and over and over�
Death of a Thousand Cuts - The last Buend�a dies of this from an army of ants.
Death by Childbirth: In a variation, little Remedios dies after a terrible miscarriage. Played straight with Amaranta �rsula.
Death Is Cheap: Melqu�ades.
Death Seeker: Played with in the case of Colonel Aureliano. He isn't actively seeking death, just waiting for the right time to die.
Determinator: Jos� Arcadio Buend�a. His sheer inability to give up on one mad dream after another results in the foundation of Macondo and drives the plot for the first several chapters of the book.
The Ditz: Mauricio Babilonia. Pietro Crespi, to a certain extent.
Dogged Nice Guy: Gerineldo M�rquez, to Amaranta.
Downer Ending: Amaranta Ursula succumbs to Death by Childbirth. Hers and Aureliano Babilonia's child dies too and his corpse is eaten by ants. Aureliano, who has crossed the Despair Event Horizon already, sees his kid dead and then realizes it's the last clue to decipher Melquiades's scripts. As he's reading them and uncovering all the secrets of Macondo and the Buendias (his true bond with Amaranta Ursula included), Macondo is destroyed by a tornado and everyone dies.
Disproportionate Retribution: Prudencio Aguilar insults Jos� Arcadio Buend�a over his lack of a sex life with Ursula. Jos� Arcadio Buend�a kills him with a spear ten minutes later.
Driven to Suicide: Pietro Crespi. Subverted with Colonel Aureliano.
Easy Amnesia: The entire town, briefly, and more permanently Rebeca, as a symptom of a plague.
Emotionless Older Man: The Colonel.
Empathic Environment: Arguably.
Friend to All Living Things: Mauricio Babilonia and the yellow butterflies.
Full Name Basis: Jos� Arcadio Buend�a, the family patriarch, and Colonel Aureliano Buend�a once he achieves that rank. It helps to differentiate them from their successors.
Gag Penis: The first Jos� Arcadio was described as "very gifted" in his manhood, and the discovery of that resulted in him being drafted away from home by a impressed lover. Also, Aureliano Babilonia from the penultimate generation.
General Failure: Colonel Aureliano Buend�a, although not technically a general. Starts a lot of wars, and loses all of them.
Generational Saga
Generation Xerox: The Aurelianos and Jos� Arcadios. Lampshaded by �rsula more than once.
- Subverted with the Segundos. They each have some traits of their predecessors, but some are switched around, maybe due to the Twin Switch they perpetuated as children.
Genki Girl: Amaranta �rsula, and to a lesser extent, her older sister Meme before her.
Genre Savvy: �rsula, to a degree.
Ghost Town: Post-deluge Macondo.
The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Amaranta and Rebeca.
Good Scars, Evil Scars: Amaranta's burnt hand.
Gratuitous Foreign Language - Latin during a conversation with the priest, and the bookshop owner sometimes says phrases in Catalan.
Happily Adopted: Aureliano Babilonia thinks he's this. This is what leads him to have relations with Amaranta �rsula, setting off the events that culminate in the end of Macondo and the Buend�a family.
He Who Fights Monsters: Subverted by Colonel Aureliano Buend�a. Through the war's course he becomes increasingly cold and cruel, and one of his subordinates and personal friend even lampshades it, but he ends up becoming an apathetic Hikikomori making gold fish.
Hikikomori: Various characters shut themselves in rooms, usually the workshop or Melquiades' room. Sometimes it's only temporarily. The most "famous" are Jose Arcadio Segundo and the Colonel
Historical In-Joke: Colonel Aureliano Buend�a's involvement in war between the Liberals and Conservatives.
- The massacre of some two or three thousand people by the banana company actually happened � the book just fictionalizes it.
Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Pilar Ternera, Petra Cotes and Nigromanta.
I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: The mermaids: "The great swamp in the west mingled with a boundless extension of water where there were soft-skinned cetaceans that had the head and torso of a woman, causing the ruination of sailors with the charm of their extraordinary breasts."
I Wished You Were Dead: Amaranta. Twice.
Impoverished Patrician: Fernanda del Carpio.
Incest Is Relative: After marrying her own cousin, �rsula spends most of her life desperately trying to prevent this from destroying the family, but it happens anyway. Amaranta provokes this in a few of her nephews and great-nephews, but never follows through with it.
- Subverted by Jos� Arcadio, who marries his adopted sister Rebeca shortly after meeting her for the first time. Aureliano Babilonia thinks he's safe from this because he thinks he was adopted.
Innocent Fanservice Girl: Remedios the Beauty, who loves going around naked. She even lampshades this by saying it's the best way to go around.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Mauricio Babilonia is a fan of Brutal Honesty, but can be somewhat sweeter when with Meme. It's mentioned that Meme starts falling more genuinely for him ones she deduces that his brusqueness towards her is, to a degree, his way to show tenderness.
Karma Houdini: Amaranta. She first plans to kill Rebeca just to prevent her from marrying the man they both love, Pietro Crespi. She then drives the same suitor to slit his wrists and another wastes his entire life with her cat-and-mouse Emotionless Girl act. Oh, and then there's the fact she molests both her nephew and grand-nephew when they are children, leading both of them to have terrible emotional problems and obsess over her their entire lives. Her only punishment? Knowing she will die when she finishes weaving her own shroud.
Kissing Cousins: Jos� Arcadio Buend�a and �rsula. Happened also to some other members of family, with pig-tailed child as final result.
- Book Ends: A relative of Jos� Arcadio and �rsula had been born with a pig's tail as a result of incest, which had led �rsula to refuse to consummate her marriage in the first place.
Knight Templar Parent: Fernanda, so damn much.
Loads and Loads of Characters: The book comes with an invaluable family tree. Everyone born into our marrying into the family has A Day in the Limelight. Some characters get more love than others, but I can't think of a single character than can be considered the protagonist of the story.
- This troper was certain for the first half of the book that it was the Colonel's story, but having read the whole thing if one character can be pointed to and called the protagonist it would have to be �rsula who is the direct or indirect cause for almost everything that happens in the course of the story and who's yearnings best encapsulate the overarching desires and drives of the Buend�a clan. For this troper the story after �rsula's death felt like it had had its life sucked from it and it was simply tidying up to close shop.
  - Fridge Brilliance: of course you did. �rsula was the leader of the clan, after she died the Buendias quickly fell into decadence and the last survivors were just ghosts of their former glory.
Lolicon: See Wife Husbandry.
Loners Are Freaks - Most characters are loners in their own way, and freaky in their own way. The ones that are more obviously loners, such as the Hikikomoris, are also more obviously freaky (Jos� Arcadio Buend�a, Colonel Aureliano Buend�a, etc.)
Mad Dreamer: Jos� Arcadio Buend�a, who devolves into a Cloudcuckoolander in his old age.
May-December Romance: Amaranta Ursula and her first husband, Gaston.
Magic Realism: This is a Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez novel, after all.
Marked To Die: All of the sons Colonel Aureliano Buend�a has during the war are eventually given cross-shaped ash marks on their foreheads. It makes them easy assassination targets.
Miniature Senior Citizens: The matriarch of the family, �rsula Iguar�n, lives until she is 120 years old� and by that time has shrunk to the size of a fetus. So much that her descendants Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula use her as their doll.
Multigenerational Household
Nice Hat: Melqu�ades has one with a brim "like the wings of a crow".
Not If They Enjoyed It Rationalization: Near the end, Aureliano Babilonia is unable to cope with his attraction to Amaranta Ursula, who is his aunt and who he believes to be his sister, and rapes her while her husband is in the other room. She tries to fight him off at first, but ends up enjoying it so much that her feelings of love are transferred from her husband over to him.
Old Retainer: Several, but the most notable is Santa Sof�a de la Piedad, who, albeit is the mother of Aureliano Segundo and Jos� Arcadio Segundo, is treated as another servant, and she seems to like it in that way.
One Steve Limit: Massively averted. Male names are passed down through family lines in every conceivable combination. It's part of a larger theme of history's cyclical nature.
- Notably, during the war Colonel Aureliano Buend�a sires 17 sons� who are all named Aureliano. People resort to calling them by both their names and maternal surnames, i.e: Aureliano Triste, Aureliano Amador, etc.
  - And said dad also had a child before, with Pilar Ternera. His name? Aureliano Jos�.
- If you don't have a superhuman short-term memory, you will need the family tree provided kindly by the publishers at the start of the book.
Only Sane Man: For most of the book, �rsula is the most (and sometimes only) sane voice in the house. Lampshaded now and then.
Planet of Steves
Princess In Rags: Good Lord, Fernanda. Lampshaded when she goes on a two-sentence rant that lasts more than two pages about how she was raised to be a queen, only to be treated like a servant by her in-laws, who have no respect for her or her golden chamberpot.
Proper Lady: Little Remedios, and Santa Sof�a de la Piedad later. Subverted with �rsula, who is very devoted to her family, but also extremely stubborn and more than capable of standing up to her husband and children.
Precision F-Strike: Several. And they are glorious.
Jos� Arcadio Buend�a: [showing his son a yellowish mass of gold in a crucible] What does it look like to you?
Jos� Arcadio: Dog shit.
Rape Is Love: When Aureliano Babilonia rapes Amaranta �rsula. This is also how Pilar Ternera lost her virginity, and which made her join the caravan that founded Macondo in the first place.
Redemption in the Rain: The whole town. Not that it helps, anyway.
Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies - In one fell swoop, Macondo is eventually destroyed.
Roma: Several. Melqu�ades eventually becomes a permanent fixture in the house after he comes Back from the Dead. Then he dies again, then comes back again, then just sort of vanishes�
Scars Are Forever: Amaranta, who burns her own hand as self-punishment for Pietro Crespi's suicide.
Shell-Shocked Veteran - Colonel Aureliano Buend�a.
Shout Out: To some earlier stories by M�rquez, such as Big Mama's Funeral.
Sibling Yin-Yang / Red Oni, Blue Oni: Any pair of brothers named Jos� Arcadio and Aureliano. Reversed with the Segundos.
So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Remedios The Beauty, albeit the curse part is less for her and more for the people around her.
Spoiled Sweet: Meme by Aureliano Segundo, who lets her fish money right out of his pocket.
Star-Crossed Lovers - Meme and Mauricio Babilonia.
Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism
Strawman Has a Point - In-universe example: when conservative Apolinar Moscote explains politics to Aureliano, he makes strawmen out of liberals' positions on many topics. The only topic he's not apathetic about, legal acceptance of illegitimate children, is something in which he agrees with the liberals'. What makes him become a liberal, however, is watching the conservative commit electoral fraud right afterwards.
The Stoic - Colonel Aureliano Buend�a becomes this some time during the war. Ursula comes to believe that he was actually like this from the very beginning.
Tangled Family Tree - And how.
Tarot Motifs - Mentioned occasionally during Pilar Tenera's fortune tellings.
Theme Naming - Lampshaded thoroughly and the characters themselves are aware of this. The Jos� Arcadios are outgoing, stout and subject to a cruel, final fate. Aurelianos are more laid back and inquisitive.
- Played with in the third and fourth generations of the Buend�a family. While Arcadio and Aureliano Jos� each take after their fathers (Jos� Arcadio and Aureliano, respectively), Arcadio's sons Aureliano Segundo and Jos� Arcadio Segundo take on the opposite personalities from what their names indicate. See Twin Switch.
Title Drop - During the ending.
Too Good For This Sinful Earth: Little Remedios and Remedios the Beauty.
Tsundere: As mentioned, Meme is a Type B. Normally a rebellious and somewhat vain Genki Girl, she goes all tsuntsun when Mauricio appears.
Tragic Keepsake: Amaranta's black bandage.
Trippy Finale Syndrome.
Twin Switch: Jos� Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo, so much that the family traits associated with their names are swapped. Lampshaded when their coffins are accidentally switched at the last minute.
The Voiceless: Meme becomes this after losing Mauricio Babilonia.
Walking the Earth: Jos� Arcadio, although he returns after going around the world sixty-five times. Melqu�ades and his band of Roma also do this (they've been just about everywhere, too).
What Beautiful Eyes: Aureliano Amador, one of the 17 Aurelianos, had deep Green Eyes contrasting with his dark skin.
- Also, Mauricio Babilonia. Fernanda was surprised when he saw him for the first and only time and looked into his deep Brown Eyes... and then she kicked him out of the Buendia house.
Wife Husbandry: Little Remedios and Aureliano, who's old enough to be her father. Well, she was smarter and more mature than the average girl, but still, he proposes marriage when she's just nine�
Pilar Ternera: You'll have to raise her first.
Wise Beyond Their Years: As mentioned, Little Remedios matured very quickly after marrying Aureliano, becoming a competent and cheerful homemaker loved by everyone. Hence, why her early death hit everyone so hard.
World's Most Beautiful Woman: Remedios the Beauty.
Write Who You Know: Colonel Aureliano Buend�a is based on M�rquez's grandfather.
Wrong Genre Savvy: Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta �rsula were both raised to believe that Aureliano Babilonia was adopted, therefore thinking that being each other's Victorious Childhood Friends, screwing each other and having a child will have no harmful consequences. They're proven wrong, with tragic consequences.
You Can't Fight Fate