I could read and write and talk about this book for a long time without really knowing whether I have understood what it is all about. This is often a shared characteristic of books and films that I enjoy. This is my first exposure to the work and mental playground of Gabriel Garíca Márquez, who I believe summarizes a little of his own thoughts when he writes this about one of the book’s characters: “His fervor for the written word was an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence.” The breadth and depth of the writing is hard to begin to understand because the world inside the book itself has the dual ability to be simultaneously earnest and ridiculous.
What is One Hundred Years of Solitude about? Well the simple, and possibly the true, answer is unsurprisingly: solitude. The book takes place in the mythical city of Macondo and follows the lives of the Buendia family, who all have the same names and are as inscrutable as they are lucidly written. Macondo is a land where myth and reality are the same thing, where people literally ascend up to heaven and shrink to the size of a baby when they get old. Where people play as much of a role in the family after they are deceased as they did when they were alive. Where different people make the same mistakes expecting something new to happen. In Macondo blood follows a path home to alert of death, buried treasure is hidden in the floorboards, and prophetic scrolls are translated just in time for the prophecy to come true. In Macondo it rains for five years without end, and then doesn’t rain for ten. In Macondo everything happens at the same time. Incest is incessantly present within the book and betrayal is far more common than loyalty within its pages. The constant drum beat of war, death, and birth are pounded into the reader’s consciousness generation after sad generation. Love without lust, and lust without love swirl around in the air just like the flying carpets that roam the city. The book is deeply political yet too illusive to pin down specific goals. Great battles are waged by the liberals who first fight for freedom, then fight for power, then fight for peace by fighting themselves, and then drift away into the night with barely a whimper. The lonesome pursuit of nostalgia and the crushing weight of the past is beautifully illustrated throughout the book, and culminates in this passage:
“Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they sh*t on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
His idea regarding what he calls the “paradise of misery” is also captured in another passage:
“Aureliano Segundo thought without saying so that the evil was not in the world but in some hidden place in the mysterious heart of Petra Cotes, where something had happened during the deluge that had turned the animals sterile and made money scarce. Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.”
These passages are just snippets that don’t do this book justice. It is funny, weird, sad, revelatory, interesting, mysterious, and full of imagery and metaphors that will linger in my mind for a long time to come. If this review is confusing and meandering and seems like I’m trying to write everything about the book all at once, good. Welcome to Macondo.