100 Years of Solitdue-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This review will come in two parts. Firstly, I will give my appraisal and interpretation of the book along with my opinion and experience in the shade of over a month it took to finish this novel. Then later on, after having read the wiki analyses and expose provided at the end of the book, I will compare notes. *** One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that felt like fate had placed in my lap. For the better part of six months, three times a week, I would shop for books at the library to stockpile for profit online and this novel kept popping up. Then, online as well—in reviews and random articles. Almost as if some omniscient force lay within the pages, beckoning me to read it. I wish I could sit here, 45 minutes removed from the final sentence of the book, and proclaim that—through the medium of Gabriel Garcia Marquez—ethereal avenues of the mind, previously concealed, had become revealed. But alas, that was not the case. Shortly after the first chapter began I found myself slipping into a mental fog and then perfunctorily reading through the lengthy paragraphs without a care about digesting the material. The story line of this book demands so much of the reader and ambushes you with a fusillade of metaphors that I found it near to impossible to keep up. The poetic descriptions were without a doubt etched with deep passion and Gabriel's lexiconical tool chest was very rich indeed, but neither of these elements made up for the deficiency of cohesive storytelling. Magical realism can do that to you sometimes. Not that I denounce all magical realism, as some of my favorite works are spun from this particular flavvy of yarn. But once you settle into and accept the atmosphere (or lack thereof) of the world the author is placing you into, the stories eventually come to make sense, and you, as the reader, are rewarded with the final jigsaw piece to unfamiliar fragments of the imagination thrust upon you from the outset. Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joseph Heller come to mind as some of the greats that are able to demand the incomprehensible to be construed as comprehensive and be embraced by the reader at the end. In a short assessment of what I remember of Gabriel's work, here is what I was able to gather: In the beginning, Macondo—a fictional village in Colombia—was discovered by Jose Arcadio Buendia, after tiring of modern life and traversing mountain ranges and vast swamps in search of a hidden utopia, and eventually finding it. He and his family settle within their secluded outpost unpolluted from the sins of the outside world and begin to live life in alignment with how God designed man to reside in the Garden of Eden. This lasts for a very short time. Shortly thereafter a band of Gypsy's stumble upon the village pedaling all sorts of miraculous knick-knacks that possess the ability to seemingly produce miracles from any human beings fingertips. In reality, the town had become so secluded from the world for an indeterminable amount of time that the discovery of magnetic properties and explosive elements has bypassed them entirely. Ever the gullible, Jose unquestioningly squanders away the families tiny savings account of silver pieces and sets up a laboratory at the back of their house which becomes his sanctuary. He continuously retreats to the sanctuary for lengthy periods of time performing addled experiments that lead to nowhere and even manages to melt the remainder of his families silver coins to the bottom of a frying pan, rendering them worthless. Some time later, the gypsies return with another wide variety of tools and knick-knacks and Jose abandons his previous obsession and begins anew with fresh expenditures, starting the cycle all over again. His witless experiments become so unnerving to everyone around him that even the gypsies themselves, who had swindled him both times, explain the basic properties of what they had sold, acknowledging the fact that there is no magical force underneath the rudimentary materials of magnets, ice, and telescopes that they had pedaled. Which turns out to be nothing but hot air. Jose becomes consumed with making trinkets and golden goldfish in his shop, abandoning his family and outside life in the village. Macondo receives more and more visitors as time goes on. One orphan in particular shows up at the Buendia's doorstep carrying a bag of bones and suffering from the disease of insomnia. Jose recognizes this and tries to warn the village, but her cries go on ignored and then the entire village becomes infected with insomnia and nobody sleeps for two months straight. Within that time frame they are able to build the infrastructure of the village to unparalleled heights and only miss sleeping because of the absence of dreams. This spell of sleeplessness goes on for another undetermined amount of time before a new crop of strangers arrive to exploit the success of the village for their own gain and proclaim that, in order to preserve their current state of nirvana, their needs to be a governmental institution. Back and forth civil wars are waged between conservative and liberal factions where no battles are won and both democracies inevitably crumble. The townsfolk who once fought so heartily on both fronts wish to just return to their original innocence and abscond into strange sexual dalliances—often incestual in nature—and self-imposed imprisonments. One character who has devolved with time into a bumbling loon is tied to a tree and left there throughout the seasons, fed and bathed by the community, and seems to be in total bliss. More characters come and go that establish banana, goldfish, and sweets on a stick economies while complicated romantic trysts continue to enrapture the Buendia's. This continues on and on until the village becomes deserted and awaits destruction from a preordained hurricane, with only the final two Buendia's making passionate love and destroying everything in their path until the moment of rapture. *** This is a pretty butchered recollection, but to the best of my ability it is how I remember the story unfurling. In a final assessment, I see this as a retelling of the books of Genesis and Exodus with a mashup of Babylon and Sodom and Gamorrah intertwined with a bit of Colombian flavor. The exodus of the Jews from Egypt to the promised land is mimicked in Jose's conquest of the swamps and mountain ranges. Then, after having found Macondo, and despite it being delivered by God as beyond everything Jose could have wished for, he picks from the tree of knowledge (the Gypsies knick-knacks), and all hell breaks loose. Just as God persistently allowed the Jews to fall into captivity through the bondage of their sworn enemies, so too does he allow Macondo to become soiled by the multitude of visitors who come to disturb the bliss of Macondo for their own gain. The natives forsake God's directive to not worship false idols and the Buendia's posterity becomes a massive blur chock full of tempestuous relationships and desertion. Some relatives are birthed through town prostitutes, others become shell-shocked from seeing 3,000 villagers machine-gunned to death (that everyone else swears never happened). I see Macondo as the original purity of the soul, and the visitors as the devils offering for greater thrills in the form of sin, and then mans inevitable acceptance and the everlasting turmoil that followed in Macondo as the ignorant state of mans obstinate rejection of God's guidance. This may be way off the mark. But Gabriel does deliberately inject several Biblical passages, so perhaps I may be closer than I think.

We shall see… *** According to Wiki: "A theme throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude is the elitism of the Buendía family. Gabriel García Márquez shows his criticism of the Latin American elite through the stories of the members of a high-status family who are essentially in love with themselves, to the point of being unable to understand the mistakes of their past and learn from them. The Buendía family's literal loving of themselves through incest not only shows how elites consider themselves to be above the law, but also reveals how little they learn from their history. José Arcadio Buendía and Ursula fear that since their relationship is incestuous, their child will have animalistic features; even though theirs does not, the final child of the Buendía line, Aureliano of Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula, has the tail of a pig, and because they do not know their history, they do not know that this fear has materialized before, nor do they know that, had the child lived, removing the tail would have resulted in his death. This speaks to how elites in Latin America do not pass down history that remembers them in a negative manner. The Buendía family further cannot move beyond giving tribute to themselves in the form of naming their children the same names over and over again. "José Arcadio" appears four times in the family tree, "Aureliano" appears 22 times, "Remedios" appears three times and "Amaranta" and "Ursula" appear twice. The continual references to the sprawling Buendía house call to mind the idea of a Big House, or hacienda, a large land holding in which elite families lived and managed their lands and laborers. In Colombia, where the novel takes place, a Big House was known for being a grand one-story dwelling with many bedrooms, parlors, a kitchen, a pantry and a veranda, all areas of the Buendía household mentioned throughout the book. The book focuses squarely on one family in the midst of the many residents of Macondo as a representation of how the poorest of Latin American villages have been subjugated and forgotten throughout the course of Latin American history." And: "A recurring theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the Buendía family's propensity towards incest. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendía, is the first of numerous Buendías to intermarry when he marries his first cousin, Úrsula. Furthermore, the fact that 'throughout the novel the family is haunted by the fear of punishment in the form of the birth of a monstrous child with a pig's tail' can be attributed to this initial act and the recurring acts of incest among the Buendías." And then finally: "Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for him or her self, the Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel. This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios the Beauty, who innocently destroys the lives of four men enamored by her unbelievable beauty, because she is living in a different reality due to what some see as autism. Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity. The selfishness of the Buendía family is eventually broken by the once superficial Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, who discover a sense of mutual solidarity and the joy of helping others in need during Macondo's economic crisis. The pair even find love, and their pattern is repeated by Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula. Eventually, Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula have a child, and the latter is convinced that it will represent a fresh start for the once-conceited Buendía family. However, the child turns out to be the perpetually feared monster with the pig's tail." *** Now, these are only copy and pasted interpretations straight from Wikipedia, and perhaps other interpretations are floating out there, but after having read the book, these assumptions I largely can agree with. In retrospect, provided you view 100 years through the lens of a biblical microscope, the allegories may make sense. But so far as being the direct vein of lifeblood through which Gabriel was aiming to achieve, then I would have to say that I was—in large part—wrong. But not so far off the mark that I wasn't within the neighborhood of interpretation. Mankind's tendency to give into greed is as inherent in its nature to eat, sleep, and breathe. After what I had seen firsthand in the casinos, I come to view avarice as akin to one's shadow—impossible to get rid of. Through the euphemism of Macondo, a fictional village inspired by his childhood spent at his Grandparent's home in Aracataca, we see the exploitation of Latin America through Imperialism and the pinpricked continents struggle to emerge from the everlasting political tug of wars, both aided from the natives and fought against, to emerge with a true sense of identity. I must echo one critic's observation that there was a consistent theme of battle fatigue written within every chapter. The narrative tone of indifference to both death and prosperity subtly implements a thread of pessimism within the mind of the reader. As if to say that the magical details leading up to the end are merely superfluous stardust, due to man's inherent nature for selfishness, doom lies ahead at the end of the road no matter what. At least, that was how I felt. And in the end that's exactly what happened. I understand what Gabriel was attempting to imply, and to some degree he was successful. But as a reader who looks forward to his alone time of escaping into the altered reality of another person's realm, I did not find 100 Years to be a very pleasant experience. When I deduce what is presented in front of me as a rather laborious effort that will only pay off in the end with about %15 amount of satisfaction, then I cannot whole-heartedly recommend it to the masses. If I had a salubrious amount of heart invested in Colombia and its heritage and history, this book may have been more endearing. But I am American, and the suspension of reality and the arduous task of deciphering every single sentence to extract an ulterior message was not very enjoyable.

Good effort. Grandiose literature. Poetic. Beautiful. But not worth a read.

Grade: C-

Verdict: Pass