Consider the following statements about the book 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 1) The novel employs magical realism to narrate the rise and fall of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo. 2) It presents a linear historical account focused solely on Colombia’s political events in the 20th century. Which of the above statements is/are correct?

Correct — A. Statement 1 is accurate. García Márquez's 1967 novel follows the Buendía family in Macondo, a town he invented, from its founding to its destruction, and it is told in the mode of magical realism.

Statement 2 fails on the word solely. The novel draws on Colombian history, from civil wars to a massacre of banana workers, but it is a family saga, not a political chronicle. That leaves statement 1 alone: option (a).

Why the others are wrong

• (b)
  Only statement 2 is correct — Statement 2 is false, so it cannot stand alone. The book is a family saga set in an invented town, and Colombian politics is one strand of it, not its sole subject.
• (c)
  Both statements 1 and 2 are correct — Accepting both means accepting solely. The novel uses Colombian history as backdrop and metaphor, but it is fiction about one family, so statement 2 does not hold.
• (d)
  Neither statement 1 nor 2 is correct — Statement 1 is accurate: magical realism, the Buendía family and the fictional Macondo are the novel's defining features. Rejecting it throws away the half of the question that is right.

Magical realism tells impossible events in the same matter-of-fact voice as ordinary ones. In this novel Remedios the Beauty rises to heaven while folding a sheet, and a plague of insomnia wipes out the town's memory.

The story runs across seven generations of the Buendías, from José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán founding Macondo to a great wind that erases it. Names and traits repeat down the family line, which is why readers often call its sense of time circular.

Key facts

• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) was published in Spanish in 1967 by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
• It follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo.
• García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
• The novel's massacre of striking plantation workers is based on Colombia's 1928 Banana Massacre.

Common traps

• Rejecting statement 1 because Macondo sounds like a real Colombian town: it is fictional.
• Accepting statement 2 because the novel does draw on Colombian civil wars: the word solely makes it false.

No directly related past PYQ was found.