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 “G...

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 violenc...

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 ...

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 cen...

The path opened by Úrsula, Macondo’s new leader, triggers an irreversible change, further fueled by the town’s first business—her candy animal industry. But before Macondo fully succumbs to the seduction of capital and its "machines of well-being," visitors from other times bring the plague of insomnia to the town. Nadia Celis and her guests, Chrissy Arce and David George, explore the collective amnesia of the Macondians, the town’...

In the iconic opening lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo—the town founded by the Buendía family in the heart of the Colombian Caribbean—becomes the seed of the world. In this episode, Nadia Celis sits down with historian Kristen Block to explore how the Caribbean emerged as the “navel of the world.” Together, they uncover the historical currents that shaped this region and dive into the origins of the Buendía family, t...

In this opening episode, Nadia Celis and her guests situate us in Macondo, the imaginary town where García Márquez located the saga of the Buendía family. But Macondo is not only a fictional town. Silvana Paternostro, a Colombian journalist in London, and Hector Hoyos, a Colombian professor at Stanford University, discuss their own experiences coming in and out of Macondo, and grappling with the ambivalent legacy of "magical r...

For over fifty years, the characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude have lived freely in the imaginations of readers around the world. But with the upcoming Netflix adaptation, this iconic story is about to take on a whole new dimension, transforming how we experience García Márquez’s extraordinary metaphor of humanity’s history.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Together is a podcast series for both longtime fans of this literary ma...