One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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One of the twentieth century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude
is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and
the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career.
The
novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of
Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant,
it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In
the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one
sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay
of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
Love and lust, war
and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of
life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these
universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and
comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political,
personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling.
Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than
an account of the history of the human race.
I've read this book before, and only recently finished it. I don't know if I struggled with it because my brains have been poked and prodded, or because my memory sucks, or because this is just a tough book, but it takes place over the course of a
literal hundred years, and many of the characters have the same names across generations. Aureliano Buendía and the 17 (literally 17) other Aurelianos over the years made this book a challenge for me this time around, but even though I found it challenging, I loved it. Gabriel García Marquez is the king of
magical realism, and he gives the reader no chance to figure out which way is up before someone inexplicably floats away, someone else goes blind and nobody notices, and for no discernible reason, it rains for more than four years.
The version I read was translated by Gregory Rabassa, and he did an incredible job of keeping the lyrical prose and the poetry embedded in the plot with chapters that enveloped me in beautiful words and sentences like a warm blanket.
My favorite quote from this book, when a group of men are traveling through a dense jungle:
"The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin . . . For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief" (Garcia Marquez 11).
A universe of grief. My God, how beautiful is that?
I imagine the all-encompassing silence in this dense jungle. I remember the days after my diagnosis. After the sobbing, after the hysterics, the panic and fear. The stillness in the house. I felt like I was silently drowning in my sorrow. Shattered to pieces, scattered all over the floor. Days merged into nights, and still I cried until I was all dried up inside.
The men in this chapter are overwhelmed by ancient memories, and I was overwhelmed with ancient traumas from my youth rising to the surface unexpectedly. Old hurts mixed with the new, perhaps as a reminder we are made of all the pieces of our pasts, whether we like it or not. They say that the present is a gift, but if I may be so crude, sometimes, it is a shitty gift, the kind where you paste on a fake smile and hope nobody notices the disappointment in your eyes.
This universe of grief still overwhelms me. I mourn the many things I have lost, from the piece of bone in my skull to the ability to actively engage in large groups of people without debilitating anxiety. I grieve for all of these lost things, but none of that grief can be expressed as beautifully as GGM did. Read this book. It is beautiful and it is weird, and it is worth every page.
