Although Macondo begins in his fiction to epitomise coastal Caribbean banana areas, most Colombians now realise it's a metaphor for Colombia itself. They see themselves, it is a mirror they hold up to themselves. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. One Hundred Years of Solitude is probably the most famous novel out of South America, written in 1967 by the Colombian who would go on to win the Nobel prize for Literature in 1982, Gabriel Garc a M rquez. Garc a M rquez is connected with a style of writing which the Western world has called magical realism.
Magical realism tries to bring in everything and keep it in the same tone.
It deals with a social reality, where the collectivity still believe in magic and superstition. For example, where priests can fly when they drink chocolate. As Western readers we don't believe this but the characters don't doubt it. It deals with an area where superstition is still prevalent and that's the main way of understanding life and what happens. First they brought the magnet.