One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Wikipedia:  This is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia.

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.

Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 37 languages and has sold more than 30 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works in the Spanish literary canon.

As a metaphoric, critical interpretation of Colombian history, from foundation to contemporary nation, One Hundred Years of Solitude presents different national myths through the story of the Buendía family, whose spirit of adventure places them amidst the important actions of Colombian historical events. 

The basic structure of the novel traces the chronicle of the Buendía family over a century. It is the history of a family with inescapable repetitions, confusions, and progressive decline. Beginning sometime in the early nineteenth century, the novel's time span covers the family's rise and fall from the foundation of Macondo by the youthful patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, until the death of the last member of the line. Throughout the narrative, the fates of the Buendías and Macondo are parallel reflections. In fact, we witness the history of a people who, like the wandering tribes of Israel, are best understood in terms of their genesis from a single family.

What did I think:

I started this novel twice with an interval between.  I felt I had not given the novel my full attention the first time and went back again resolving to give more focus to the narrative and try and wrap my head round the characters.  But this was such a problem, with the repetition of names as the narrative unfolded.  But not just the repetition of one character's name, but the successive naming of subsequent generations using the small pool of names for the characters.  I mean, 17 Aurelianos and 7 generations of Buendias!!  There were times when I felt as if I was reading the Bible.  It's a family saga without equal!

I resorted to Wikipedia and thought, well if I read this I will at least have learnt something about the plot, the symbolism and metaphors, the context, the significance in Latin American literature, the reasons for the acclaim it received.  And, what magical realism is.  Well, to be truthful if I never read another magical realistic novel again I will be happy!  My reading temperament is not cut out for the blurring of fantasy and the real world.   It's a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary,  a constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. 

I was interested to read what the Solitude of the title represented and I read that:

"Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected.  Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for him- or her-self, the Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel."

In addition to Wikipedia I read other critiques and sets of study notes ion the Internet in order to try and get inside the framework and purpose of the novel, but in truth even these bits of text had my head spinning.  But of all the comment and criticism I read about 100 Years this particularly struck a chord with me:

"Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel García Márquez have both received occasional criticisms. Stylistically, Harold Bloom (Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and has written 40 books including 20 on literary criticism - so he knows a thing or two) remarked that "My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb... There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it."  

That was the problem, the intensity of concentration the book seemed to require almost reduced me to tears of frustration.

But at least I know a bit more about this important and iconic novel than I did before and, in a way, I'm glad it was chosen!