One Hundred Years of Solitude Together

The devastation of Macondo by the flood is deepened in Chapter 17 of One Hundred Years of Solitude with the death of Úrsula. “The Solitude of Úrsula” is a tribute to the invisible heroines of the novel and the real women whose personalities and stories inspired them. In this unique episode, Nadia Celis speaks with María Margarita Mockler, a niece of Gabriel García Márquez, about the role of memory within the family that nurtured “Gabito’s” stories. Together, they also explore the lives of her aunts —the real women who inspired the Buendía women— whose legacy has defied the tragic fate of the novel’s female characters. 

The events that would deliver the fatal blow to Macondo take center stage in Chapter Fifteen of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That’s when the Colombian state teams up with the United Fruit Company to brutally suppress the workers’ strike through a massacre—and then strategically erase it from memory. In this episode, Nadia Celis is joined by Paula Cuéllar, and Elvira Sánchez-Blake to unpack the long-lasting impact of state violence and the evasion of truth in addressing recent armed conflicts in Colombia and Latin America. Through the eyes of mothers who, like Úrsula, are weary of bringing children into the world only for them to go off to war, and who have dedicated their lives to demanding justice, this conversation sheds light on how history keeps repeating itself, fueled by the “plague of forgetfulness.

The next era of Macondo is marked by the townspeople's perplexity following the arrival of the train. New neighbors and modern artifacts appear, adding to a series of marvelous occurrences that make them lose their grasp on reality. In this episode, Maria Rueda and Ryan Kovarovics join Nadia Celis to explore how bewilderment obscures the town's invasion by foreign powers and plays into García Márquez’s “magical realism". They also examine the leadership embodied by the Buendía family, and their failure to protect their people from the dangers hidden beneath technological progress. 

The bloodiest era of One Hundred Years of Solitude begins in the sixth chapter with a summary of the dozens of armed uprisings led by Colonel Aureliano Buendía, including the one that will bring him before the firing squad. In this episode, Nadia Celis and Allen Wells, a historian of the Caribbean and Latin America, guide us through the real wars that inspired García Márquez and the many mutations of that monster throughout the century the novel synthesizes. They also discuss the degenerative effects of power and its violence on Aureliano, the people of Macondo, and their heirs, both within and beyond fiction.