One Hundred Years of Solitude

An absolutely bonkers-brilliant novel about an enchanted and cursed family

Wow.

You have an idea of what a book of this caliber is going to be like. One might imagine how “serious” it’s going to be, for One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a BIG novel—not just in length but in gravitas (one of the 100 best novels written of all time) and required reading for many youth in Latin American. So in a way, it reminded me of when I read Moby Dick for the first after putting it off for years, thinking I was going to have to struggle through some big “serious” work and, much to my surprise, I soon found it to be something else entirely—funny, wild, filled with jokes about cannibals and Christians.

Just like Moby Dick, One Hundred Years of Solitude ended up being a lot wilder, weirder, enchanted, cursed (and incestuous) then I could have ever imagined.

One Hundred Years of Solitude or “Cien Años de Soledad” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is required reading in many South American and Latin American cultures for the way in which it captures the fantastical/magical realism storytelling of the region combined with the history of colonization and modernization, all told through the eyes of seven generations of the Buendía family. While I’d been wanting to read it for years, I’m not going to lie, the fact that there will be a Netflix series premiering in December finally gave me the push—though I can’t imagine how they’re going to manage to contain such a wild work literature. Here is the trailer in case you’re interested:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

This is the first line of the book (one of the most famous opening lines in literature).

There’s a lot going in in this one sentence. It holds all three elements of time together. 1. The sentence is told in the present POV of youth Aureliano Buendía, 2. meanwhile foreshadowing the future “firing squad”, through 3. a distant callback to the past, “Remembering the distant afternoon” previous of our point. There’s also mention of a firing squad, (what could one do to face such a firing squad?!) along with this discovery of ice, which is far removed the Colombia we usually think of. And so it begins. The sentences are crafted meticulously is what I’m saying. And yet the only real challenging aspect of the book is that each character has some version of the same two names: “Aureliano” and “Jose Arcadio.”

The book is set in Marquez’s home of Colombia, in an enchanted valley that for many years is inaccessible to the outside world, visited only by gypsies until it is slowly opened up and discovered by the world. The enchantments are less magical and more bizarre. A bout of insomnia strikes the town which keeps the residents awake for several days and weeks at a time. A period of rain lasts for four years and eleven days until people’s skin becomes covered in algae. Livestock flourishes as long as one Buendía and his mistress copulate frequently. One Buendía starts a civil war then dissappears into his workshop to make tiny gold fish figurines for the rest of his life. Two of the family members have very large penises. A father and his son (and brother) all end up sleeping with the same prostitute. A matriarch does her best to hold the family together.

For there are not only enchantments in Macondo, but curses, as each of the Buendías slowly withdraws into themselves and their solitude, thereby continuing the curse to the next generation until the town itself ceases to exist. In their solitude, the Buendías are drawn to love and sexualize the only people close to them, like an aunt or an adopted daughter.

As someone who is often withdrawn, distant, and can easily get swallowed into my own solitude, I know exactly what it’s like to withdraw into oneself and cease to interact with the world, how it is comforting yes, but also isolating and dangerous. In this way the book acts as a warning but it is also, in some strange way, a comfort.

In another strange twist, the marketing campaign for One Hundred Years of Solitude has already kicked off. When I went to the store to buy bananas the other day, I noticed a sticker for the new Netflix series on the bananas themselves,  which if you’ve read the book you know the irony of such a thing. The banana company that came to Macondo was one of the main reasons for the towns downfall.

I really can’t get this book out of my head and would love to hear anyone chime in if they’ve read it!