Annotate With Sara

Episode 2 of Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude Adaptation Inspired This Post

I wish I knew who is responsible for planting all the “little gold fishes” in Episode 2: It’s Like An Earthquake. I’d like to shake this person’s hand and then ask tons of questions about how this came to be.

I have a particular fondness for the “little gold fishes,” which are part of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s character arc, in the book. 16 times, I annotated those little fishes in the original text.

Noticing Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s little gold fishes in Episode 2 of the new adaptation was exciting, to say the least.

“Little Gold Fish” Details from Episode 2

“Little Gold Fish” Annotation Guide For The Book

• page 66 Colonel Aureliano Buendía gives a little gold fish to his child bride Remedios…
• page 107 Colonel Aureliano Buendía “made his living from the little gold fishes that he manufactured in his workshop in Macondo. 
• p 140 Colonel Aureliano Buendía dreams of dying in “rural peace…making little gold fishes.”
• p 174 “he passed the time putting little gold fishes together”
• p 175 Amaranta tries to “reconcile her image of the brother who had spent his adolescence making little gold fishes with that of the mythical warrior…”
• p 196 Aureliano Segundo thinks about learning the art of making little gold fishes, but gives up.
• p 203 Colonel Aureliano Buendía is making little gold fishes again.
• p 219 “He ordered them to leave him in peace, insisting that he was not a hero of the nation as they said but an artisan without memories whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.”
• p 249 After the war, Colonel Aureliano Buendía makes little gold fishes and keeps in touch with rebel officers.
• p 263 Colonel Aureliano Buendía stops selling the fishes, but keeps making them.
• p 270 Colonel Aureliano Buendía makes the little gold fishes and them melts them down again, over and over again, obsessively.
• p 285 Amaranta realizes why Colonel Aureliano Buendía was stuck in “the vicious circle” of making fishes. 
• p 316 Soldiers take the little gold fishes as relics.
• p 321 Fernanda wonders about “the vice of building so that he could take apart” as it relates to Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s little gold fishes.
• p 366 Aureliano gives Amaranta Úrsula 14 little gold fishes.
• p 416 passage about Colonel Aureliano Buendía “stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes”