Contents
It took me time and courage to find proper words to write anything on One Hundred Years of Solitude, for Gabriel Garcia Marquez mesmerized me into a tranquility I didn't know how to break. It demands courage and tremendous skill to create and destroy your own creations within 417 pages.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Columbia in 1927. Influenced by his grandmother's vivid storytelling, Marquez decided at an early age that he wanted to be a writer. Upon completion of la Universidad de Cartagena, Marquez began his career as a reporter and soon began to write short stories. His earliest stories were published as early as the 1950s, yet in 1964 while living in Mexico City with his young family, he completed Solitude in a mere eighteen months. Finally published for the first time in 1967, Solitude sold millions of copies, establishing Marquez as a world renown writer, leading to his receiving the Nobel Prize in 1982.
The prime characters of the book, Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran lived in an isolated Colombian village where branches of the same family intermarried for centuries, resulting in children born with pigs tails or looking like lizards. Determined to end this cycle of incest, Buendia and a group of pioneers crossed the mountains and founded the village of Macondo. In the mid 1800s, Macondo was a fledging community, with Buendia, an alchemist, its most respected member. Jose Arcadio and Ursula went on to have three children: Aureliano, Jose Arcadio, and Amaranta. These names and the personality traits that distinguished the original bearers of these names repeated themselves over the course of a century.
Throughout the novel and the century of change to Macondo, all the Jose Arcadios were solitary individuals and inventors. Determined to decipher the gypsies secret to the universe, they holed themselves up in an alchemist's lab, rarely seen by the outside world. The Aurelianos, on the other hand, were leaders of revolution. Colonel Aureliano Buendia started thirty two civil wars yet lost all of them. A relic who fathered seventeen sons of the same name and grew to become Macondo's most respected citizen, his spirit of adventure and discovery repeated itself in the descendants who bore his name.
Women held the family together. First Ursula who lived to be 122 years old and then her daughter Amaranta, the women expanded the family home and raised successive generations so that new Jose Arcadios and Aurelianos would not repeat the mistakes of their namesakes. Yet the same mistakes and characteristics occur: rejected love, spirit of adventure, lone soles willing to live for one hundred years in solitary confinement. Additionally, the two characters who predicted all the events of the novel were not even members of the Buendia family: Pilar Ternera, a card reader who specialized in fates and could look at a Buendia to know his future; and Melquiades, a gypsy who befriended the original Jose Arcadio, leading all the successive generations to a life of solitude.
The points readers can expect to witness by reading this novel are listed as :
1. A perfect portrayal of how fateful human activity mars the innocent beauty of nature’s creation. It is a human instinct that, the more we discover the more we demand. In this way, we suck into the inescapable cycle of life.
2. Happiness, solitude and death have connection. At first, Marquez equates solitude with death. Later on he includes individuals happy to live out their days alone.
“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia”
3. Past may be a burden but it is also a great guiding force without which there's no future. The only way to retain your sanity is to remember your history and cling to it. This idea helps in nation building.
4. Use of metaphor to depict the struggle of a nation, a continent. Here we have a metaphor for the struggle of Maruqez’s native country and continent which is passing through internecine wars on its way toward externally imposed modernity.
5. The tone of this novel is set ab initio. History gets back in Mocando again and again and every generation is but a repeat of the past. For an instance :
“ Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
It is to emphasize the cyclical nature of time, in my opinion, that names of principal characters are repeated in every generation, sometimes to the confusion of the reader, easily rectified by going back to the family tree provided in the start of the book.
“…time was not passing…it was turning in a circle...”
Although I tried to avoid getting into this discussion, but a review of this work is not possible without throwing in the inevitable buzzword ? “magical realism”. Marquez was one of the first writers to use “magical realism,” a style of fantasy wherein the fantastic and the unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences. Some readers may dislike this book on the basis of the unrealistic style and narrative Marquez used in describing an event. But in Aristotle’s words “a convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility”.
With a cup of good coffee, if one read this book, one can find how efficiently Marquez used “magical realism” in order to make point of his example of solitude: a man bleeding to death down the street; yellow butterflies announcing a man’s presence, a rain of epic proportion that would not end; fire ant everywhere into the city which feed on human flesh; escape of a character into the sky by her laundry……. etc etc.
Finally, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude can be called as the “First Testament of Latin America”. Voluminous but a virtuoso performance.