One Hundred Years of Solitude — Book Review
One of those books that grows up on you. “An intricate stew of truth and mirages.”
Is it fantasy? Is it reality? Is it a dream? One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece, an enormous classic by Gabriela Garcia Marquez, the spell-binder who has made alive fiction with imagination that burns the reader with every page. He has led to a paradigm shift by his gripping narration that is an intricate weave of politics, history and literature. The book is placed in the realm of magical realism but I am not sure if it does it justice.
One can’t help but be transported to the magical town of Macondo, the land of floating virgins, reincarnating gypsies that have predicted destiny of the town itself, accurate to the T, the place that does much but cloy. It is the home-town of Buendias, the family that lived a curse — the curse of loneliness and pining- pining for love both of which take them to a self-destructive course. Centering around the six generation of this one family, it is a tale of lovers and lies, sanity and fantasy.
And, amid all this make-belief are naked emotions at play, mankind displayed at it truest and rawest. Prostitutes defining love, children being abused, and workers mistreated and massacred. There is science driving men crazy, commerce alienating people from their roots. Is Marquez condoning or condemning, one is left wondering! Maybe he is using fantasy to simply put it out there for people to see things as they exist. Can’t know! Is the banana company a metaphorical alternative for capitalism? Looks that way. The region is after all socialist in nature. Maybe, some of us would pick up history books!
It is not just writing but the exquisiteness in style that makes the book legendary. By no means is it saying that the book is easy to grasp. But once you get the hang of the author’s style, it is addictive. So much so that when the book ends, a discerning reader would shudder some.
Dramatic like the rest of the book, it comprises a character finding a parchment manuscript with the family history recorded “one hundred years ahead of time” . The author of these had written in Sanskrit and “had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.” The narration holds memory and prophecy, illusion and reality together, blurring lines often. The last line was deciphered at the same time the wiping out of the town was prophesied.
“For it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was urepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
At the end, I would say that it is a book of a lifetime; that which stays with the reader for a long time, letting one marvel in the depths created by the master wordsmith — the founding and uprooting of people, beliefs and a town. There is no judgement just truth smeared across the 400 pages. This book is not only multiple grades better than Love in the Time of Cholera but one that proves that Marquez was not just an author but a poet in prose, a seer almost.
