One Hundred Years of Solitude recap

The novel follows seven generations of the Buendia family in the remote South American town of Macondo, which the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula found in the wilderness. Over a hundred years the town grows from an isolated settlement visited by wondering gypsies into a place touched by civil war, a foreign banana company, and eventual decline. Family history repeats itself as sons and grandsons bearing the same handful of names relive the same passions, obsessions, and solitude: the legendary Colonel Aureliano Buendia wages many futile civil wars; a massacre of banana-plantation workers is carried out and then erased from official memory; a years-long rain and slow ruin follow. Haunted throughout by a fear that intermarriage among relatives will produce a child with a pig's tail, the line finally closes when the last Aureliano deciphers the gypsy Melquiades's parchments, discovering that they foretold the whole family saga, just as a great wind sweeps Macondo and the Buendias, condemned to one hundred years of solitude, out of existence forever.

In an unnamed South American country, the headstrong Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran lead a small group of families through the wilderness and found the isolated town of Macondo. In its early days the settlement is a place of innocence and wonder, cut off from the outside world and visited periodically by a band of gypsies whose leader, the mysterious Melquiades, brings magnets, telescopes, alchemy, and other marvels that fire the patriarch's restless imagination. Around the founding couple grows the first generation of the Buendia family, including the solitary, uncanny young Aureliano and his physically imposing brother Jose Arcadio. The premise establishes Macondo and the sprawling Buendia clan whose intertwined fortunes, recurring names, and inherited solitude the novel will trace across a hundred years, hinting from its very first sentence at wars, wonders, and doom to come.

The Buendia line dwindles to its last members as Macondo itself decays. The final Aureliano, unknowingly, fathers a child with his own aunt, Amaranta Ursula, and the long-dreaded family curse is fulfilled: the baby is born with the tail of a pig, and after its mother dies in childbirth the infant is carried off and devoured by ants. Alone in the crumbling house, the last Aureliano at last succeeds in translating the ancient parchments left by the gypsy Melquiades, and finds that they are the complete, prophesied history of the Buendia family across its hundred years, written down before the events occurred. As he reads the final pages, describing the very moment he is living, an apocalyptic wind rises and erases Macondo and everyone in it from the face of the earth. The family, and the town, vanish completely, for, as the closing lines make plain, races condemned to one hundred years of solitude are granted no second chance on earth.