One Hundred Years of Solitude

Some say, some books, you should never read again in later life. I’ve heard it said, for instance, that having enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye when one was seventeen, that it is a mistake to return to it in middle or later years. Thomas Mann prescribes the reading of his The Magic Mountain, “not once, but twice” – though omits to specify any interval. Having just finished reading ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I feel that this is a novel that one could beneficially revisit several times throughout one’s lifetime – say every two decades? And that’s quite a numerically reasonable suggestion because if - as at least two of the many characters in this narrative do – you live to the age of one hundred, that’s only five reads in a lifetime. For me however, there’s a snag. Somehow, when this novel was published and I was seventeen, I slipped through the net of readership, this is my first reading, and now at the age of seventy-three – according to my own perhaps rashly-prepared gospel – quite possibly it will be my only reading! A shame, because this is one of the richest, most dense, detailed, dreamlike, formalist, symbolic, mysterious, magical, funny - I had some good laughs, and some nightmares! – pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Painting equivalents? The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, Guernica, The Persistence of Memory might give one some idea of the level of detail – not necessarily content – one’s in for.There are twenty-four main protagonists agonising over seven generations of the BUENDIA family in this intense stylish saga which more or less coincides with the crackly political and social history of Colombia between the years 1820 and 1920. Unsurprisingly the plot is baffling. Its weave is not unlike that of a Wilton carpet, so instead of 'U' shaped yarns, the fibre is woven all the way through the carpet and then sheared to create a range of cut and loop textures. Every so often characters pop up to the surface, having travelled invisibly under the substrate for scores of pages, and years. Sometimes without any apparent explanation, build or lead in. The reader might be forgiven in thinking that s/he had one foot in a William Burroughs cut-and-paste text and the other in a David Bowie lyric. It might cause annoyance to a convergent thinker, but just relax and enjoy passages such as; ‘when he asked for the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen on this earth, all the women brought him their daughters. He became lost in misty byways, in figures reserved for oblivion, in the labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one’s thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages.’ But there’s much more than the apparently ‘cut-and-paste’ plot. Here are just some of the themes and symbols which go fuguing away throughout the narrative; gold, ice, buried treasure, death – particularly by firing squad, the death of birds flying into things, incest, the invisibility of people, cannibalism, and of course solitude. There are curious repeat mentions of anointings, lye, chamber pots, small candy animals, gypsies, macaws, small golden fishes, the drawing of chalk circles, begonias and the requirement – or not, a political reference – to paint one’s house either blue or red.So, I leave you with a few further almost edible Marquezian phrases; ‘more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his,’ or ‘solitude had made a selection in her memory, and had burned the nostalgic piles of dimming waste that life had accumulated in her heart,’ or how about, ‘the journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem’? But perhaps we should attribute at least some of this tickly prose to Gregory Rabassa his translator?

The rise and fall of Macondo, a fictional town founded by the Buendias, whose story covers seven generations. We experience Macondo from its origins as a small acorn to its growth as a tall oak tree and then the inevitable decline to whatever is smaller than an acorn. Inevitable due to the odd bunch of people that the Buendias turn out to be - all destined for their own personal solitude due largely to their own social inadequacies. I feel that this book can be read with a straight face as well as a smile and I recommend the latter in order to enjoy those small magical episodes that crop up here and there.Now, there IS a family tree at the start of the book but with everyone called the same, things can still become very confusing, especially when the characters will not even leave the scene after death. With multiple flashbacks, no sooner does someone pass away than they pass straight back again. I found myself willing them to stay dead so as to tidy the story up a bit.All in all, whilst I enjoyed this book, it is difficult to recommend it unreservedly due to its style. Perhaps it is best left for more incisive readers to recognise bits and pieces such as character detail and the politics involved.??Finally, I'm not sure who is depicted on the cover of my book and I don't remember a scene reminiscent of the image??

To say that the fantastic tale of the Buendías of Macondo is a profound examination of human behaviour, flaws and experience is more than a little pedestrian, but, then again, besides Gabriel García Márquez much is pedestrian.As these behaviours, flaws and experiences are too much to fit into one lifetime, we find characters replayed through generations, and lifespans extended well beyond the norm. The overriding sense is one of benign curiosity about it all; events are observed through detached but not unsmiling eyes. There are many Aurelianos and José Arcadios, for example, and the women may well exceed a hundred years in age. Their lives are played out in a magical world defined by religion and superstition as much as by reality. It may rain for four years; there are thirty-two civil wars; visiting girls need more than seventy chamber pots; a young woman ascends to heaven; and red ants continually threaten foundations, as if they are entropy made visible. It is all disturbingly lit, as if conjured up in a delirium. But it is also a warning.In all this, Márquez scrupulously avoids the sentimental. There is no tugging at the heartstrings; he simply sets out what happens. Ageing is ageing, dispassionately described; madness is madness, people go mad. And he has a twinkle in his eye, too: death is death, but any thoughts of maudlin sentimentality are banished by farce.The confusion of characters with similar names is deliberate, because the more the history of the Buendías unfolds, the more it resembles what has already passed. It is almost fractal. It was repeating before we were born and it will repeat when we are gone, we are led to believe. We expect that as we approach the end there will be more Aurelianos and José Arcadios, spinning off into a future where there will still be hubris, idiocy, infidelity and intransigence. Should we stop taking it all so seriously, and surrender to the absurdity of it all, because it will repeat itself no matter what?Then there is born what Márquez describes as the first child in a hundred years to be engendered with love. But he is born of an incestuous relationship. His father wishes him to be called Aureliano, though by this time the red ants have seen to it that it scarcely matters. The last in the line of that name has already lost his friends and his lover, and, as the spellbinding final pages tighten their grip, he finds he can at last decipher the parchment of a gypsy called Melquíades. As the walls of the city of mirrors collapse around him, we learn that everything that has been written is not, in fact, repeatable. Márquez the magician looks us squarely in the eyes. The twinkle has gone. Beware of sealing yourself off from others, he says; withdrawal will warp you. When the winds blow there will be no-one. You will have no second opportunity.

Fun to read. A lot of characters but there’s a chart to keep up. I’m a huge Marquez fan and this is one of his best works. The book overall gave me a sense of solitude after I was done. Netflix is releasing a series soon based on the book. Not sure how I feel about it because the writing style and plot of the story is complex. I recommend reading up on Colombian history during the 60s and 70s because he does touch on that in the book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is into fiction.

Good read

This book is good...but I recommend to buy hardcover of this.

Livro em ótimas condições. Uma edição linda com letras com relevo, recomendo!

Assolutamente da leggere