One Hundred Years of Solitude: Lecture at NUML

ISLAMABAD: A lecture was arranged for the students of National University of Modern Languages (NUML) on Wednesday.
Dr Shaheena Bhatti delivered the lecture to the students of MPhil in English Literature at the Faculty of Advanced Integrated Studies and Research.
The book “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published in 1967 and the famous Colombian novelist and short-story writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave his intellect about the people living among the civil war ridden areas. The novel has now got the status of a masterpiece of the world Literature.
“One of the main features of Marquez’s writing is his narration of the unheard and untold story of the defeated and the vanquisher,” Dr Bhatti said during the lecture.
Marquez, she said, was a Latin American and would write on political problems. “As Colombia was colonized by Spain, everything was recorded from the coloniser’s point of view,” she said.
Dr Bhatti told the audience that the novel was initially banned in Latin America. Marquez had a specific style of writing real stories combined with mysticism and magic. This type of manipulation in writing stories was employed due to the fact that the colonial masters would otherwise ban the writers.
She explained the title by saying, “One Hundred Years” symbolize the duration of the civil disobedience, civil war, colonisation and war in Latin America.
She also told the audience that the magic realism encompasses myth, magic and other supernatural things that were not present in the European realism.