The Point of Myth?

I suppose if your taste runs to JRR Tolkien and Carlos Castaneda this would be a book for you. But mine doesn’t and this isn’t. I prefer James Joyce and Carl Jung. I understand Marquez’s metaphorical recapitulation of the history of Latin America, his articulation of the repetitiveness of human folly over generations, his recognition of the dangers of human inquiry and technological progress, his appreciation of the dialectical quality of things like ambition, masculine strength, sex, and family life. But I am still left unimpressed and unaffected by the result.

For me the various Jose Arcadia Buendia’s and their homophonic relatives are like Hobbits. They operate in the world in a permanent state of awed surprise - slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. They lack the ability for introspective reflection and so bumble from one crisis to the next but never confront the inimical content of themselves with any awareness. They'd rather be at home but only when they're away from it. Consequently there is no tension of development, of discovery, but merely the flatness of yet another unnecessary familial trial that leads nowhere except to further obsession and avoidable grief. After all, at least Joyce’s Bloom and Homer’s Ulysses have moments of personal insight or revelation. In contrast, Marquez’s JAB’s seem obstinately obtuse.

Like any other parabolic myth, One Hundred Years satisfies many interpretations, even contradictory ones: the world of the inquiring intellect vs. the world of the participative human being; personal ambition vs. communal duty; power and its conceits; the sources of tribal identity, etc. But for me these possibilities don’t lead to anything more meaningful than the opportunity presented by a telephone book to ring up any number of strangers. I find nothing ‘larger’ to which such things point. The various JAB’s are fatally fascinated solely by what presents itself in front of them. I think I would prefer the story of Marquez’s gypsy seer, Melquiades, who had “an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things.” But Marquez doesn’t say anything else about what that might be.

I stalled so hard on this book. Mostly because it’s terrible, but also because my life is insane right now and I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything.

(But mostly because it’s terrible.)

I think people love this book because of the way it makes them feeeeeel. It’s a highly romanticized account of a family of settlers in a magical town known as something (I forget what because I don’t care). But nothing really…happens. And while some of my favorite books are ones in which stuff doesn’t really happen, those other books have characterization or relatable internal dialogue or some other component with a depth that makes reading it worthwhile, whereas this book doesn’t delve much beyond the surface of things and seems only to rely on a kind of quirkiness to make its characters appear interesting when in fact, no they are not. I had similar issues with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, which is probably why I didn’t care for that book very much, either.

Anyway, sorry to all my friends who liked this book. I still love you even though I think you’re cray.

شعـــــورك بالعجـــــز

هذه هي مشكلة الرواية الكبرى

أنت في حال من الافتنان والنشوة لا يوصف
وانعقاد لسانك يسبق أفكارك
ويبقى بداخلك صراع دائم
يتجسد في محاولات مضحكة للتعبير عن هذه المتعة

لذا كنت احاول مراراً خلق التعبيرات المناسبة فأجدها تخرج لسانها في سخرية تاركة إياي في حيرة وقلة حيلة

عندما أمسكت بهذه الرواية لأول مرّة شعرت بانفصال تام عن الواقع من حولي
وجدتني بداخل ماكوندو حيّة أتنفس وأرى الشخصيات من حولي تتصارع مع حيواتها كما أراد لها خالقها العبقري

أنا كنتُ هناك ولا أبالغ بحرف

حلّقتُ بخفة بين موجات الحر العنيفة
أحسستُ بكل شهقة وبكل قطرة عرق
ذبتُ بين شقوق الجدران و داعبتُ الفراشات الصفراء


وهكذا نالت الرواية مني ثلاث قراءات في أوقات مختلفة
وكل مرة كان يلتصق بي بعض من هذا العالم

وهذه المرة
شعرتُ بكل ما هو حي وحقيقي بداخلي ينفصل عني ليحلق وحده بعيداً
بعيداً عن كل ما تحطم بداخلي ‏،وكل ما مزقته السنون في ماكوندو

مزجت العالمين معاً في مخيلتي وتمازجت الأوجاع ببعضها

من يستطيع التناغم مع العزلة أكثر من فرد معزول عن العالم في بقعة صغيرة من السكون؟


عشتُ العزلة أغلب سنوات عمري
أقلّب فتافيت عالمي بملعقة
تطاردني كل أفكار الدنيا ،وأنا معزولة بين جدران لا أريد مفارقتها

كانت خلاياي تناضل لتبقى وحيدة في عالم أراني لا أنتمي إليه
بداخلي أقمت مدناً لا يسكنها سواي
حدائق أزهارها لا تنتمي لتراب هذه الأرض
عانقتُ كل ما هو ذي معنى وتركتُ اللامعنى خارجاً يداعب ألوف من البشر يومياً

كيف يمكن لعائلة أن تناسبني أكثر من عائلة بويندياالضاربة بجذورها ف ي عزلة الروح ‏والجسد؟

لأنه مقدراً لمدينة السراب أن تذورها الرياح وتُنفى من ذاكرة البشر
في اللحظة التي ينتهي فيها أورليانو بوينديا من حلّ رموز الرقاق
وأن كل ما هو مكتوب فيها لا يمكن أن يتكرر منذ الأزل إلى الأبد
لأن السلالات المحكومة بمئة عام من العزلة ، ليست لها فرصة أخرى على الأرض

ما الذي فعله ماركيز بي؟
كيف أنتج عالماً كاملاً بين دفتي كتاب ،وأتقن صنيعته إلى هذا الحد؟
و استطاع ببضع أسماء أن يخلق تجانساً في الشكل والملامح
في الخواطر والأحلام
في قرارات الحياة
وفي المصير المؤلم
وفي نفس الوقت خلق الاختلاف يداعب التجانس خطوة بخطوة ويتمرد عليه

فصاغ أبطاله بحرفية صياغة الكولونيل أورليانو لأسماكه الذهبية
كنتُ أتخيل ماركيز يجلس منعزلا في غرفة
يمسك بشخصياته كما يمسك الكولونيل بسمكاته‏
يعجنها بيديه ويشكل أوهامها وحقيقتها بمهارة ‏
يضيف لماسته المموهة ببصمته
كما يلصق أورليانو عيون السمك الياقوتية فتتوهج الملامح في روحك
وعندما يكتمل عددها يصهرها من جديد كي ينتج جيلاً جديداً يحمل نفس الإسم والملامح بطعم ‏ومصير مؤلم جديدين

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘

بين تعسّف آمارانتا وحزنها المذعور، وصلف فرنادنا وأطباءها المتخيلين
وبراءة ريميديوس الطفلة ودماها ، و قسوة أركاديو التي طاردته منذ اللحظة التي رأى فيها عملية إعدام
وصلابة أورسولا وعزيمتها المثيرة للإعجاب
تعيش لحظات سحرية لا معقولة
لاشيء فيها بلونٍ واحد ولا يعرف حدة الأبيض أو الأسود
فقد يأتي العذاب من الجمال الباهر والسذاجة بطريقة لا تتوقعها إلا مع وحشية القتال ودمويته

فريميديوس الجميلة تأتي في وسط الرواية مثل كائنٍ بلوري شفاف
تقترب منه مبهوراً بلئلائه
فتعانق جبلاً جليدياً تتجمد معه حتى الموت
أو كتلة زجاجية صافية بريئة تمزق لحمك وتتشرب دمك حتى الموت
مثل الجليد الذي بقى يطارد روح الكولونيل أورليانو
ومثل شبح ذيل الخنزير الذي ظل يحوم حول البيت الكبير حتى تمكن منه
لينبعث منها أنفاس موت ، لا لفحات حب
وتنتهي محلقة مع ملاءات البيت إلى السماء في طبقات الهواء العليا حيث لا تستطيع الوصول إليها أعلى طيور الذاكرة تحليقاً


مين أين يبدأ السحر هنا؟
هل رأى ميلكاديس قدر العائلة أم خطه هو بيديه؟
هل تشوف الحوادث العجيبة في بللورته السحرية أم كانت لعنة تلك التي أطلقتها تعاويذه عبر رموزها السنسكريتية؟

كيف فعلها ميلكاديس بين مواقد المخبر وفقاعات التجارب في القوارير وأزيز غليان الزئبق؟
وكيف نشأت ماكوندو حقاً؟
أهي صُممت بعرق خوسيه الأكبر وكفاح أورسولا أم نشأت بين أبخرة مخبر بدائي قدّر له أن يكون المبتدى منه وإليه المنتهى؟

من أين جاءت هذه العائلة التي يولد طفلها الأول بين المستنقعات
بدون ذيل خنزير وبرغبة أبدية في الجنون
ليشهد بداية ماكوندو
ويولد طفلها الأخير بين أنقاض البيت وسط الحشرات ولفحات الحر الأخيرة
بذيل خنزير من حبٍّ حرام
كي تتحقق النبؤة
وكي يموت الجنون فيه قبل أن يبدأ
ليشهد نهاية ماكوندو

وفي جو يشبه المستنقعات تسقط أوراق ماركيز الحاملة الرواية المنقحة في الوحل كي تعود لتجففها زوجته ورقة ورقة
تراها أكانت لعنة ميلكاديس لحقت بها؟
!

خاض الكولونيل أوريليانو بوينديا 32 حرباً أهلية خسرها جميعاً
ومن خلال كفاحه المكلل بخيبة الأمل
وإدراكه في النهاية أنه خاض تلك الحروب لينتهي منعزلاً أكثر مما كان ساخطاً على العالم وعلى نفسه
وعلى كل فكرة بدأت نبيلة وانتهت محطمة بوحشية الدم وشهوة السلطة

و ماركيز كان دوما مناهضاً لجميع الممارسات القمعية لدكتاتوريات العالم ودكتاتورية أميركا اللاتينية بشكل خاص ، ومؤيداً لثورات التحرر
وقد خاض جده حروباً في أمريكا اللاتينية ، وكان ميلاد ماركيز يوافق سنة مذبحة إضراب مزارع الموز والتي أنكرتها الحكومة فأعاد إحياءها في الرواية

*-*

"يقول ماركيز "الخيال هو تهيئة الواقع ليصبح فناً

تنتمي هذه الرواية لنوع أدبي يسمّى
magical realism
وفي هذا النوع يسري الخيال محلقاً في بيئة واقعية بحيث يشكل جزءاً طبيعياً منها
حيث يقوم حدث شديد الغرابة بغزو حياة منطقية واقعية
وإن كان المؤلف قد وصف روايته بأنها تنتمي لأدب الهروب من الواقع

كثيرة كانت الرموز الممزوجة بالخيال في الرواية
فبين السفينة الغارقة ، ووحل المستنقعات ، وشجرة كستناء صبور
وبيانولا ترقد في الظلام تصاحبها ملاءة بيضاء
عاش الأبطال حيواتهم العجيبة في عزلة أبدية تحتضن برفق هذه الصور في دواخلهم إلى الأبد

أكثر ثلاث مشاهد ت��لغلوا إلى روحي ألماً

آمارنتا تضع يدها في في جمر الموقد إلى أن تألمت إلى حد لم تعد تشعر معه بالألم
ليبقى لحمها المحروق وضمادة الشاش السوداء في ذهني طوال الرواية يطاردني
*
*
لحظة إطلاق النار على ماوريسيو بابيلونيا وكأنني أنا التي أنهار في غرفة نوم ميمي
*
*
ولحظة اكتشاف آخر أورليانو من السلالة الوليد يتحول لجلد منفوخ بعد التهام النمل الأحمر إياه‏

بين صفحات الرواية قضيتُ وقتاً لا يضاهى
أقرأ ملحمة من أعظم ما كُتب على مر العصور
عن مدينة نبتت في الوحل وغاصت فيه مجدداً
لتتركني مع آخر صفحة أود العودة إليها من جديد
كي أتمتع بهذا العالم الخرافي حتى الثمالة
لتذروه الرياح مجددا ،ويختفي من ذاكرة البشر
ثم يعود نابضاً في صفحات ماركيز
فتتشربه ذاكرة القراء إلى الأبد

n  "Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it."n
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

This dazzling tale of the Buendía family spans generations. It is a rich account of people carving out a life for themselves in Macondo, a town founded by the patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía.

"At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

José Arcadio Buendía is a corker! He is so hell-bent on making a wondrous discovery that he fritters away the family money on inventions purchased from a wandering troop of gypsies who miraculously show up in Macondo on occasion. Thankfully, his levelheaded wife (and first cousin), Úrsula Iguarán, works herself to the bone to make sure the family won’t starve to death. During this fantastical journey, wars were fought, fortunes won and lost, and hearts wholly decimated, leaving the jilted lovers dead in a flower bed. It must be said that the Buendia family’s foolish choices are an endless source of drama and entertainment.

"Look at the mess we've got ourselves into," Colonel Aureliano Buendia said at that time, "just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas."

I’ve read Márquez before and loved his work, but this was a whole other animal! He expertly blurs the line between magic and realism so smoothly that it feels as if he was creating cinematic electricity! The horror is tempered by a big dose of whimsy that had me laughing through my tears. The writing is agonizingly beautiful, and each character exquisitely drawn.

In a lifetime of reading, there are only a few extraordinary novels that touch the very fabric of a person’s being—For me, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those. I was transported into Márquez’s dreamlike creation, and for the past few days had forgotten the real world and lived entirely in his. My only regret is that it all had to come to an end.

So, if you are looking for an epic novel to steal your breath away, look no further!

Thank you, Kevin Ansbro. Your outstanding review pointed the way to this magnificent read!

O CAPODOPERĂ A REALISMULUI MAGIC

Ce am apreciat cel mai mult și m-a prins din primele pagini a fost limpezimea exprimării, precum și faptul că limita dintre real și fantastic (opera fiind considerată o capodoperă a realismului magic) nu este deloc sesizabilă.

Spectre ale morților circulă printre vii, interacționează cu aceștia verbal/fizic, invenții stranii, clarviziuni, licori cu puteri speciale, prezicerea viitorului în cărți - sunt tratate de către autor ca și cum nimic nu ar fi mai logic pe lume.

قبل أن أقول رأيي في الكتاب... أقول لمن نصحني به: سامحك الله على هذ النصحية.. أضعت مالي ووقتي فيما لا يفيد....
ثم أتعجب من أولئك الذين أعجبهم الكتاب بحيث وضعوا له خمس نجمات... بل وإن منهم من يقول إن الكتاب غير حياته... لا أدري هل كان هذا الكتاب الوحيد الذي قرأوه في حياتهم؟ هل غابت عنهم عيون الأدب؟ لا أدري ماذا حل بالذوق الأدبي للقراء العرب...
ومن ثم أقول للمترجم... هداك الله.. ضيعت وقتك وأوقاتنا في غير فائدة.. المصيبة أنه يعلق على ترجمته للكتاب فيقول إن هذه الرواية من أجمل ما قرأ!
لا أدري ما هو سر ولع كتاب أمريكا اللاتينية بالغجر والكيمياء وتحويل المعادن إلى ذهب وحجر الفلاسفة (آه من حجر الفلاسفة) والعرب ...
عندما قرأت "الخيميائي" لباولو كويلو صدمت صدمة عنيفة به لكنني أكملته إلى آخره... وهذا الكتاب يشبهه إلى حد كبير جدا...
يتنقل بك الكاتب بين الأحداث كما يتنقل الطائر وهو ينقر الحب عن الأرض....
المفروض أن تشدك الرواية لقراءتها لكنني لم أستطع أن أتجاوز الصفحة 49 من الكتاب...إذ تخيلت نفسي وأنا أقرأه كمن يمشي حافيا على الحصى في ساعة القيظ...
يكاد يكون لجميع الرجال في الرواية الاسم ذاته وهو "خوزيه أركاديو" بحيث يضطر الكاتب إلى التفرقة بينهم بترقيمهم : خوزيه الأول والحفيد والابن والجد وهكذا...
بالمختصر المفيد.. الكتاب سيء جدا بكل المعايير ..ولا أنصح به أجدا خصوصا من يمتلك ذوقا رفيعا في الأدب ومن ينتقي ما يقرأه بعناية...
تشتت وضياع... إباحية...وعلاقات محرمة (سفاح) بين الأقارب... ومضيعة كبيرة للوقت...
الحياة قصيرة لتضيعها في قراءة كتاب سيء كهذا.....

"Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvellous 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 shit 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."

Revised 28 March 2012

Huh? Oh. Oh, man. Wow.

I just had the weirdest dream.

There was this little town, right? And everybody had, like, the same two names. And there was this guy who lived under a tree and a lady who ate dirt and some other guy who just made little gold fishes all the time. And sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn’t, and… and there were fire ants everywhere, and some girl got carried off into the sky by her laundry…

Wow. That was messed up.

I need some coffee.

The was roughly how I felt after reading this book. This is really the only time I’ve ever read a book and thought, “You know, this book would be awesome if I were stoned.” And I don’t even know if being stoned works on books that way.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which is such a fun name to say) is one of those Writers You Should Read. You know the type – they’re the ones that everyone claims to have read, but no one really has. The ones you put in your online dating profile so that people will think you’re smarter than you really are. You get some kind of intellectual bonus points or something, the kind of highbrow cachet that you just don’t get from reading someone like Stephen King or Clive Barker.

Marquez was one of the first writers to use “magical realism,” a style of fantasy wherein the fantastic and the unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences. While I’m sure it contributed to the modern genre of urban fantasy – which also mixes the fantastic with the real – magical realism doesn’t really go out of its way to point out the weirdness and the bizarrity. These things just happen. A girl floats off into the sky, a man lives far longer than he should, and these things are mentioned in passing as though they were perfectly normal.

In this case, Colonel Aureliano Buendia has seventeen illegitimate sons, all named Aureliano, by seventeen different women, and they all come to his house on the same day. Remedios the Beauty is a girl so beautiful that men just waste away in front of her, but she doesn’t even notice. The twins Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo may have, in fact, switched identities when they were children, but no one knows for sure – not even them. In the small town of Macondo, weird things happen all the time, and nobody really notices. Or if they do notice that, for example, the town’s patriarch has been living for the last twenty years tied to a chestnut tree, nobody thinks anything is at all unusual about it.

This, of course, is a great example of Dream Logic – the weird seems normal to a dreamer, and you have no reason to question anything that’s happening around you. Or if you do notice that something is wrong, but no one else seems to be worried about it, then you try to pretend like coming to work dressed only in a pair of spangly stripper briefs and a cowboy hat is perfectly normal.

Another element of dreaminess that pervades this book is that there’s really no story here, at least not in the way that we have come to expect. Reading this book is kind of like a really weird game of The Sims - it’s about a family that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and something happens to everybody. So, the narrator moves around from one character to another, giving them their moment for a little while, and then it moves on to someone else, very smoothly and without much fanfare. There’s very little dialogue, so the story can shift very easily, and it often does.

Each character has their story to tell, but you’re not allowed to linger for very long on any one of them before Garcia shows you what’s happening to someone else. The result is one long, continuous narrative about this large and ultimately doomed family, wherein the Buendia family itself is the main character, and the actual family members are secondary to that.

It was certainly an interesting reading experience, but it took a while to get through. I actually kept falling asleep as I read it, which is unusual for me. But perhaps that’s what Garcia would have wanted to happen. By reading his book, I slipped off into that non-world of dreams and illusions, where the fantastic is commonplace and ice is something your father takes you to discover.

------
“[Arcadio] imposed obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a Liberal victory. In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a scarecrow. At first no one took him seriously.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude is an absolute ground-breaking book; it is intelligent, creative and full of powerful anecdotal wisdom. It deservedly won the noble prize for literature. But how enjoyable is it? How readable is it?

Gabriel García Márquez, plays around with reality itself; he plays around with the limitations of fiction; he uses elements of magic, of the fantastic, to give voice to things that could never be said quite as effectively in normal terms: he breaks through realism and establishes his own original style. He did nothing short of launching a new mode of literary address: magical realism. He wasn’t the first writer to do such a thing, though his writing was the first to attract criticism which, in effect, allowed for it to be defined and recognised.

For me, the strongest element of the book resides in its inherent pessimism, with its unfortunate understanding that history can (and will) repeat itself. All good intentions go awry, indeed, One Hundred Years of Solitude challenges the progress (or lack thereof) of society. It creates a self-contained history in its isolated framework, which, arguably, reflects the nature of mankind or, at least, it echoes Columbian history with its liberal history in the face of imperialism. No matter how much we want to change the world (or how much we believe in a revolution or a new political ideal) these good intentions often become warped when faced with the horrors of war and bloodshed. Nothing really changes.

There’s no denying the success of Márquez’s epic; there’s no denying its ingenuity. I really enjoyed parts of the novel but it was awfully difficult to read, uncomfortably so. The prose is extremely loose and free flowing to the point where it feels like thought; it’s like a torrent of verbal diarrhoea that feels like it will never end. Characters die, eerily similar characters take their place within the story and the narrative continues until the well has completely run dry of any actual life. It is pushed so terribly far, one hundred years to be precise.

And that’s my biggest problem. I’m a sentimentalist. I like to feel when I read. I like to be moved either to anger or excitement. I want to invest in the characters. I want to care about their lives and I want to be provoked by their actions. Márquez’s approach meant that this was impossible to do so. It’s a huge story, told in just a few hundred pages. It’s sweeps across the lives of the characters, some exceedingly important characters in the story are introduced and die a very short time after to establish the sheer futility of human existence and effort Márquez tried to demonstrate.

Márquez writes against European tradition and the legacy of colonialism; he creates something totally new, which is becoming increasingly hard to do. Although I do appreciate this novel, I did not enjoy reading it as much as I could have done.

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Finally I am trying to write a review for this book after completing it a month ago and still don’t have many words to describe this book, I mean the words that can do justice to the beauty of this book.

Basically this is the story of start to end of Buendia family. Buendia family has a tradition to repeat name in the family even if they think it was a bad omen yet they follow the tradition and keep this ritual alive. And that’s why it is hard for me to recount what happens in the book in terms of story. Even if I end up mixing the names, I still remember the characters by way of their actions. And it is there, for me, lies the beauty of this tale. These characters were so same and yet so different from each other.

Marquez has blended old and new so nicely that it was hard for me to point out where one starts and the other ends. His characters embraced new things with open arms but also stayed true to their roots and kept old traditions alive till the very end. I simply can’t stop myself but marvel upon the ability of Marquez at how he kept so many threads alive at the same time. It is so difficult to do, not to mention with the same set of names. It never felt out of place. No matter how far you go, he would bring you back to the core, the Buendia family.

This book is like abstract art where you find it hard to get the meaning (don’t know about others but I am one of them) but once you get it, it just hard not to admire and cherish it.

"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."

And so begins our journey into Macondo, as García Márquez's words walk us through seven generations of the Buendia family, where time has come to a standstill, and the fate of every character seems to be written with an ink of tragedy.

Gabriel García Márquez is a truly gifted storyteller, and his ability to find metaphors, to make fables out of the most mundane events in life with the charm of Scheherazade allows him a rare distinction of being one of the pioneers of magical realism.

n  Themes and Symbolismn

The book has a plot sewn together with metaphors and rhetoric representing the story of Latin America as a whole.

Insomnia plague

Rebeca brings a mysterious insomnia plague to Macondo, causing loss of memory and sleep. The people of Macondo entertained themselves by telling each other the same nonsensical stories in repetition and everything in households having to be labeled, representing a metaphor for the story of Latin America being a repetition of its past and its cure at the hands of the sage represented its return to history, moving out of isolation.

Incest

The Buendias are shown to have a tendency towards incest, while their family always suffers from the fear of punishment in the form of the birth of a monstrous child with a pig's tail.

Gender roles

Throughout the novel, the men instigate chaos while the women strive to maintain order, sometimes in vain. García Márquez calls this a representation of the Latin American machismo.

The Glass City

The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the fate of Macondo.

Colors

Yellow and gold are two significant colors in Macondo's history. In Macondo, gold represents solitude and bad luck. When José Arcadio Buendía discovers the formula for turning metals into gold and shows his son the result of his experiment, he says it looks like dog shit.

"Yellow is lucky but gold isn’t, nor the color gold. I identify gold with shit. I’ve been rejecting shit since I was a child, so a psychoanalyst told me."

- Gabriel García Márquez in The Fragrance of the Guava by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza

The Banana Massacre

The Banana massacre was a massacre of workers for the United Fruit Company that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928 in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. The strike began on November 12, 1928, when the workers ceased to perform labor if the company did not reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions. A fictional version of the massacre is depicted in the novel.

The Flood

The story has a biblical period of rain and flood, quite similar to the tale of Noah.

Borges

Some of the themes in the novel are obviously inspired by the works of Jorge Luis Borges. The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel and many more Borges stories have similar themes of inevitable and inescapable repetition in fictitious realms.

For a long time I could not find words to write anything on One Hundred Years of Solitude, for Marquez mesmerised me into a silence I didn't know how to break. But I have been commenting here and there on Goodreads and now it is good time, finally, to gather my thoughts in one piece. But this somewhat longer review is more a labour of love than a coherent attempt to review his opus.

Marquez resets the history of universe such that the old reality ceases to exist and a new parallel world is born in which things do not conform to obsolete, worn-out laws. Everything in this world is to be discovered anew, even the most primary building block of life: water. Macondo is the first human settlement of Time Immemorial set up by the founding fathers of the Buendia family. It is a place where white and polished stones are like ‘prehistoric eggs’; an infant world, clean and pure, where ‘many things lack names.’ And it is natural that here, in the farther reaches of marshland prone to cataclysmic events, the mythscape of One Hundred Years of Solitude should come into existence.

The tone of this epic and picaresque story is set ab initio. Take a gander at this:

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

It is not long before fateful human activity mars the innocent beauty of creation. The more they discover the more they are sucked into the inescapable cycle of life. The primordial myth that moulds and shapes their destinies does not let them advance in their efforts to defeat the infernal solitude of existence, whatever they might do, however they might try. History gets back at them again and again and every generation is but a repeat of the past. It is to emphasise the cyclical nature of time, in my opinion, that names of principal characters are repeated in every generation, sometimes to the confusion of the reader, easily rectified by going back to the family tree provided in the start of the book.

An external, portentous, disastrous, evil-like power guides and transforms the lives of people in the hamlet of Macondo. The sense of foreboding pervades the whole story: the rain continuing for many days and inundating the streets, the unceasing storm before the arrival in town of a heraldic character, and the fearful episode when townspeople begin to suffer a terrible memory loss, so that to remember the names and functions of things they write it down on labels and tie those labels to objects like chairs and tables. It tells us that we cannot hope for a future if our past is erased from the slates of our collective consciousness. Past may be a burden but it is also a great guiding force without which there's no future.

The only way to retain your sanity is to remember your history and cling to it, or prepare to go insane. When one Jose Arcadio Buendia loses the memory of things, he goes mad:

n  Jose Arcadio Buendia conversed with Prudencio Aguilar until the dawn. A few hours later, worn out by the vigil, he went into Aureliano’s workshop and asked him: “What day is today?” Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. “I was thinking the same thing,” Jose Arcadio Buendia said, “but suddenly I realized that it’s still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias. Today is Monday too.” On the next day, Wednesday, Jose Arcadio Buendia went back to the workshop. “This is a disaster,” he said. “Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too.” That night Pietro Crespi found him on the porch, weeping for…his mother and father. On Thursday he appeared in the workshop again with the painful look of plowed ground. “The time machine has broken,” he almost sobbed,…he spent six months examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.n

The town is threatened when the change taking place in the outside world begins to spill over into Macondo. Here we have a metaphor for the struggle of Maruqez’s native country and continent which is passing through internecine wars on its way toward externally imposed modernity. Divisions that hitherto did not exist come to define the inhabitants of Macondo and of towns farther afield. One of the Buendias, Colonel Aureliano, takes up a piece of metalwork as new and strange as a gun to mount a revolt and bring the promised glory to his land. New lines are drawn. New alliances are made. Old friends become enemies and enemies, partners. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, when he is about to kill him, tells General Moncada:

n  Remember, old friend, I'm not shooting you. It's the revolution that's shooting you.n

The scene above captures the mechanistic element of their revolutionary war; the one below bares the meaninglessness of the conflict, so pertinent to the 20th century militarisation of the whole continent and its endless armed strife led by colonels and generals of all hues and shades.

n  Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?"
What other reason could there be?" Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. "For the great Liberal party."
You're lucky because you know why," he answered. "As far as I'm concerned, I've come to realize only just now that I'm fighting because of pride."
That's bad," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. "Naturally," he said. "But in any case, it's better than not knowing why you're fighting." He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:
Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone.”n

Although I tried to avoid getting into this discussion, but a review of this work is not possible without throwing in the inevitable buzzword – magical realism. Although the book gets high praise from most readers, it is to be expected that some readers would take a disliking to the basic ingredients from which Marquez draws his style and narrative devices. I want to address in particular one argument from the naysayer camp that pops up again and again: it is not realistic; it can’t happen; this is not how things work. So I ask (and try to answer): what is it with our obsession with “realism” that makes some of us reject the conceptual framework of this novel?

Aristotle in Poetics argues that a convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The stress is not on what can physically happen but on mimetic persuasion. This is why some novels that follow every bit of convention, every bit of realistic element in them turn out to be unbelievable stories with unbelievable characters. You want to forget them as soon as you finish the book – and toss it aside. But on the other hand Greek tragedies populated with cosmic characters pulling suprahuman feats continue to enthrall generations of readers. How realistic are those stories? It is the writer’s task to convince us that this could have happened in a world he has created and set the rules for. In that Marquez is more than successful, and this is the basis of the enduring appeal of this work.

The distinction fell into place for me when I replaced ‘realism’ with ‘truth.’ Kafka’s haunting stories are so far from the 19th century convention of realism we have come to accept as the basis of novel-writing. His The Metamorphosis is not a representation of likely human activity (how could a human transform overnight into a large insect?) but it is nonetheless a harrowingly truthful story that advances existential dilemmas and makes a statement on human relationships, familial in particular. We say this is how it would feel like to be an outcast from one’s family. Or consider Hamsun’s Hunger in which a starving man puts his finger in his mouth and starts eating himself. In the ‘real’ world Kafka’s, Hamsun’s and Marquez’s characters cannot exist but the effect of their existence on us is as truthful and real as the dilemmas of any great realistic character ever created.

Marquez, like a god, has written the First Testament of Latin America, synthesising myth and magic to reveal the truth of the human condition, and called it One Hundred Years of Solitude.


February 2015