MARQUEZ 57 names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point at them with fingers." Aureliano Buendia spends his time trying to prove that the earth is round without knowing that it had been discovered long ago. But Macondo, although it looks isolated, is not totally out of reach for the outside world. The foreign inventions are brought to the village by a gypsy tribe who had discovered a secret route to the civilised world. This contact with civilisation is symbolic of the link that Colombia and the whole of Latin America had with Europe. All that happens in Macondo is a fantastic reflection of what happened in Latin Ameria. But the isolation of Macondo is interrupted occasionally by external forces—massacre on the train Bauanera, civil wars—which dragged its inhabitants to participate in them, to participate in national political events without their eccentric individuality. The rainy season, which gets prolonged to four years, reintegrates Macondo with the original chaos. The birth of a child with a pig's tail—the result of an incestuous union between Amaranta Ursula and her nephew—signifies doom for the family and subsequently for the village. In One Hundred Years of Solitude the author, instead of straight away describing real historial events—civil wars, the prosperity and retreat of the United Fruit Company, repression and massacre in Bauaneras in 1928—has, through the introduction of fantastic elements, flying carpets, rain of flowers, resurrection of the dead etc., tries to convey the complexity and peculiarity of Latin American life and reality. Outwardly the novel develops through two major lives, where insulation is symbolised by incest and solitude. The beginning of the Buendia family, based on an incestuous relation, repeats itself after a century and meets its end. Solitude, the basic feature of the Buendia family, condemns them to death—"...because the family condemned to 100 years of Solitude does not get a second opportunity on earth". The novel, apparently, is based on a plot wherein anything can liappen (the characters die a number of times) and hence it has necessarily to lean on an element of the grotesque in order to achieve the real aim—the depiction of the peculiar, isolated and insulated Latin American society. Macondo is a magical territory with extraordinary dimensions. This feature of Latin American writing was characterised by the famous Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier as the "marvellous realm", where concrete dates recorded in chronicles and memory are transformed into a dream. It is reflected in the portrayal of nature, events, contradictions and complexities. This peculiar mode of depicting reality has to be seen in the context of the phenomenon of the so-called "magical realism" prevalent in the Latin American literary world. The mythical setting of Macondo has a striking resemblance to Marquez's home town. The so-called "Solitude" is symbolic of the isolation and insulation of Latin America prior to the Cuban Revolution. The attempt to build a world in a narrow circle, in