"Just remember that there were three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea."

Just read "100 Years of Solitude." I know I'm a little late getting into it (it was published 25 years before I was born). But I've talked to a couple people who read it and told me they only liked the beginning, specifically, one said the first chapter, the other the first half. I think that that is because once you penetrate Marquez' vision of Macondo/Aracataca the magic becomes little more than a literary treatment of a Colombian's knowledge of his own people's history.

Specifically: Treating the mis-en-scene of the novel as its world, HYOS begins with a migrating people with no ancestry or origin. They are not 'Colombians' because there is no outside world until a couple generations of Buendia bring in a train and a water port. The outside world, in fact, established by the citizens of Macondo.

The phantasies of those that live in solitude are juxtaposed against the violence, when the same enters the real world, a sentence that condemned Marquez to exile, perhaps. Out of the one character who has really snapped, lost his mind, and not a participant in magic (even while he spends his last decade in Melquiades' room of ancient texts) Jose Arcadio Segundo speaks the one truth, the one history, from the real's inverse in literature, in the center of the magic, the eye of Marquez' intentionally orientalized home, is the thesis:

"Just remember that there were three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea."