Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Written: 1967
Translator: Gregory Rabassa
Pages: 422 Pages
Structure: 20 Chapters
What a wonderfully unusual book!
I approached this classic 20th century novel with no expectations. I knew nothing about the author, Gabriel García Márquez (affectionately known as “Gabo”), or his writing style. I was impressed.
“One Hundred Years of Solutidue” (Cien años de soledad) is set in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo and covers its history and that of the Buendía family over a one hundred year period from the 1820’s to early 1920’s.
It is written in an enchanting magical style where there are flying carpets, ghosts who talk, people who live to be over 140 years old, beautiful women ascend into heaven, and where it can rain ceaselessly for over four years. But that enchantment is a ruse to the unsuspecting reader which allows the author to deliver heartbreaking tragedy. The experts call this dark art “magical realism”. It’s a powerful way to weave a story.
Gabo shows us a family where each generation has confusingly similar names to the previous generation. The name “José Arcadio” turns up four times in as many generations. “Aureliano” appears 21 times. There are 17 brothers named “Aureliano” in one generation. The oft-repeated line in the book is that “time moves in circles”. When Pilar Ternera is in the final years of her life, well in excess of 145 years, the author says:
There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and ex-perience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.
With these “unavoidable repetitions” come the same tragedies of heartbreak, disappointment, insanity, and obsession. But at the same time, those repetitions are accompanied by loving matriarchs such as Ursula Buendía and Pilar Ternera.
Gabo explores the futility of war, especially civil war, the evil or corporate greed and government corruption, the destructive power of obsession and insanity, and the tenacity of an imperfect family in tough times.
In the tradition of great Latin American literature, it rejects the tinsel of a “happily ever after” story that you might find in the European and American traditions.
Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982… “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”
This novel describes the life and conflicts of South America perfectly.
It’s a difficult read. I found myself moving backwards and forwards in the book, trying to understand the relationship between people. The family tree on the first page was very useful.
Beautifully written, artistically poetic, devastatingly tragic. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was worth the effort. I’m so glad I read it.