Reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude is like being inside a Picasso painting: it’s a deconstructed reality, surreal and metaphorical . I wanted to both live in Macondo and run away from it at the same time. Imagine if your parents were Alice in Wonderland and Don Quixote and you lived in a circus, in the heart of darkness where the only light-switch was in the toaster and you took illegal drugs with elephants and all your bad and fantastical dreams and every story in the Bible and the Odyssey were true? Well then you’re some way to understanding what this expansive work of fiction entails.
Somewhere between the plague of insomnia, candied animals and carnivorous red ants destabilizing the foundations of the Buendia household; Marquez tells the story of Columbia, from ‘when the world was so recent, that many things lacked names’ right up to the mid 20th century. The African, Spanish and indigenous people; war and liberation; the coming of the railway and the united fruit company; the circular pattern of history; everything that makes up the country’s culturally rich and unique heritage. The idyllic Macondo undergoes a seismic transformation when it establishes links with the outside world. Innocence turns to violence as the past repeats and recycles and both the town and the family - tied to their hopeless inheritances’ - battle the solitude, pride and history that haunts them. Marquez’s insouciant tone allows him to seamlessly combine truth and illusion. He anchors much of the madness to specific days or times of day, for example: the little girl Rebecca arrives eating dirt and carrying the clocking bones of her parents in a bag on a Thursday (as one does); when Fernanda could scarcely breathe in a roomful of yellow butterflies - it was 2pm!
This is one of the finest novels I’ve ever read. Marquez is a genius and how he didn’t break his mind or his typewriter keeping track of the Buendia family-tree astounds me! Sitting at his typewriter for eighteen months, his wife Mercedes pawning everything to keep the family going - he created a masterwork. A seminal piece of magic realism that chronicles seven generations of the Buendia family, touching on everything: time, eroticism, death, intermarriage, violence, isolation, self-destruction, neglect - just a regular day at the office, oh and a little bit of love and hope at the end too, signalling some optimism for the future of the country. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, who Marquez himself called “the best Latin-American writer in the English language”, One Hundred Years Of Solitude questions every level of ‘official history’, it will deepen your love of language and storytelling and it will utterly blow your mind!
Highly recommended.