Cien años de soledad, 1967. Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece and the breakthrough work that put him on the literary map. Written in 18 months of solitude, where he locked himself into his room with paper and cigarettes, writing day and night. Translated into thirty languages, winner of four international prizes, the novel is certainly one of the most remarkable books ever written, a tale that spans generations told against a backdrop where the absurd seems logical and the sensible ludicrous.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the history of the isolated town of Macondo, focusing on the lives of the most prominent inhabitants of the town, the Buendía family.

This book, is an absolute pleasure to read. Garcia Marquez has you believing that daisies fall from the sky upon lovers, or that iguanas truly can gesticulate inside a woman's womb. It has become perhaps the most important book in the genre of contemporary literature known as magical realism.

This somewhat oxymoronic term pertinently suggests the fundamental thematic tension of the novel. In one way, One Hundred Years of Solitude is sensible in its approach. It does lend itself towards a type of poetic euphemism, yet it does not shrink back from portrayals of violence and sex. It also straightforwardly addresses complex political and social issues. The overall tone of the novel is matter of fact, with events portrayed bluntly, as though they had actually occurred. But into this generally realistic narrative Garcia Márquez has inserted magical elements that flout conventional realism. One incidence of this is when we witness Remedios the Beauty floating up to heaven rather than dying.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is, in a certain sense, a work of Biblical proportions. The novel conjures Macondo into being from its earliest Edenic days of innocence and traces it until its Apocalyptic end.

The major problem I had with with reading this book is that it is terribly tricky to keep track of who is who! We must keep continually flipping back to the family tree. My English teacher's suggestion is to photocopy the family tree and keep it as a bookmark. Garcia Márquez made the very deliberate decision to give the Buendía members a very limited selection of names. The novel spans six generations, and in each generation the men of the Buendía line are named Jose Arcadio or Aureliano, and the women are named Ursula, Amaranta, or Remedios. It can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between different people of the same name. Garcia Márquez' chose to do this to dramatize the way he saw history repeating itself in cycles. In this novel, each generation is condemned to repeat the mistakes and to celebrate the triumphs of the previous generation.
In order to get a grip on what's happening then we have to hence pay fastidious attention to the full names of the protagonists, which often contain slight distinguishing variations.

Milla Jovovich absolutely adores this book. It is her ultimate favourite, she loves the "nuances between dreams and reality". If you look closely, you will see her holding a copy of the book in her movie The Million Dollar Hotel. She also improvised some parts from the story towards the end of the movie.

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.

While I am not normally one to appreciate a book amounting to a catalogue of woe, a pardon can be granted on the basis of extreme beauty in composition. For me, the classic woeful novel is probably Scottish or Irish. The Country Girls and No Great Mischief come instantly to mind. Other examples of beautiful melancholy include Snow Falling on Cedars and Anil's Ghost. The oftentimes spartan style of One Hundred Years of Solitude doesn't make it an obvious member of that grouping. While there are certainly compelling images and clever similes, the book plays more like a forceful waltz than a playful piano sonata.

The overall sweep of the book is badly confused by the identical names of so many characters. Clearly, Marquez is trying to demonstrate the cyclical nature of the family history - though underscored by a long-term decline. Marquez explains that:

The history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.

While clearly intentional, the repetition becomes grating. Ultimately, Marquez presents you with a long series of character vignettes that play with similarity and difference like a piece of music alternating between repetition and invention. The most notable sections of the book are surely the snippets where Marquez conveys a wonderful image of a person with so few words as to be amazing.

The setting of the book, somewhere in Latin America, was off-putting for me. It's a place that repels me by being alien, without seeming exotic. It's the kind of place that feels dusty in the mind. Despite that sense, there are many truths presented about human relationships. I can't help thinking of my own life when I read about how:

Aureliano Segundo had the impression that no link existed between them anymore, that the comradeship and the complicity were nothing but an illusion of the past.

Likewise:

Then he thought that Gaston was not as foolish as he appeared, but, quite the contrary, was a man of infinite steadiness, ability, and patience who had set about to conquer his wife with the weariness of eternal agreement, of never saying no, of simulating a limitless conformity, letting her become enmeshed in her own web until she could no longer bear the tedium of the illusions close at hand.

The story of Ursula I found most compelling, probably because it was told in the most comprehensible and uninterrupted arc.

In the end, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a swarm of brilliant fragments that do not assemble into a particularly sensical whole. The story is almost maniacally anti-epic, with everything promising ending in failure and everything beautiful ending in ruin. Disaster piles on disaster and makes the reader wary to enjoy anything read, due to the knowledge that it will be unravelled by Marquez in the space of one hundred pages.

The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness ... What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.

—Gabriel García Márquez on magical realism

SPOILER ALERT
I wrote about what happens in the book.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1969) is one of the most important works of the century. Written in a feverish eighteen months in a workshop not unlike that inhabited by generations of Aureliano Buendías, it won tremendous acclaim almost immediately after leaving the presses. Márqez had a comfortable grasp on the Pulitzer Prize that year. Since then the story has been translated into dozens of languages and to this day enjoys worldwide popularity; Márquez has been called the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes.

In 1982 Márquez' expansive and important body of work won him the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Translator's Task

We must give the translator due credit.

eliserh will tell you that there is much more to translation than acting as a machine into which a word is entered in one language, emerging transformed into another, forming eventually a chain that through mankind's great symmetries lines up just right. There is grammar involved, and more than grammar, culture. Gregory Rabassa's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the standard of our language. It is brilliant.

Not only has Rabassa managed to preserve the art and insight of García's prose, he has managed to morph the fluid elegance of the Spanish language into something that can be enjoyed and admired in English. Similarly he has kept intact the attitude of the Latin culture in nuances of tone and inflection. This is not an academic work. It is soulful, aching with feeling. The symmetry is so perfect that one does not feel in reading as though it is a 'translated' work: rather it appears that the two authors composed the same beautiful piece simultaneously, side by side.

The Wearing of the Axle

... In all their loves, madnesses and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths ... the characters rear up large and rippling with life against the green pressure of nature itself.

—Paul West

No.

The characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude are stereotyped and two-dimensional. Most of them are not even worth mentioning. Those that do merit analysis do so only by the insights into human nature they bring about by accident. Their personalities are determined almost entirely by given name and are utterly predictable, like machines executing programs. They are not to be interpreted as human beings, but rather as abstract concepts working together toward a single terrible end—the prophecy of Melquíades. They are beautiful. They are beautiful in the same way and for the same reason that numbers in a mathematical equation are beautiful: because of the context they explain.

One Hundred Years of Solitude's theme of repetition presents itself most clearly in the way Márquez names his characters. The Buendía family is a saga of recycled names and personalities, a fact which is acknowledged several times throughout the text. All those named Aureliano are aloof and withdrawn, while the Arcadios are outgoing and enterprising. Many readers complain that the generations of characters who have the same names and personalities are confusing; this is most certainly Márquez' intent. In reading the book one is forced not only to suspend disbelief via magical realism, but also to look at the characters not as individuals but as a single entity whose pieces skirt lucidity only occasionally, by and large shifting about in the realm of the abstract. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those rare pieces of art that fits perfectly in the tiny gaps and starts of the brain's rhythm. The best way to read it is with a relaxed mind, the way that one would listen to a symphony and derive its meaning from instinct.

The Buendía family is, as Márquez himself says, a 'turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle ' (Márquez 402). Not only the Buendía family but the city of Macondo as well. The growth, prosperity, and downfall of the Buendías are projected like shadows onto that of the city at large. They are concentric and fused wheels moving in the same direction at the same rate.

The breaking of the axle—the obliteration both the Buendías and their city of Macondo—is the end to which they work. This collapse of space, time and memory into a tiny and infinitely repeating loop of logic is their function. The all-encompassing singularity that reveals itself in Melquíades' manuscripts cannot be explained because it explains everything. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story that writes itself: of a universe, our universe, which at every border turns back inward, held together by its own momentum and destined to be crushed by friction into a single mortal point.

This book is 448 pages of music made into words and should be treated as such.

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A Few of the Characters

José Arcadio Buendía

Patriarch of the Buendía family and founding father of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía personifies the often misguided fury that is the human spirit of enterprise. Despite enormous hardship and an endless string of failures he embarks on project after impossible project, taking up alchemy and composing lengthy manifestos on the science of solar warfare. The only thing that prevents him from dragging his entire family into madness is the intervention of his wife Úrsula, who insists that he limit his activities to the workshop.

Ironically the final straw that draws his wife to the conclusion that he is mad is his discovery that the world is round, a fact he announces with the stoicism of a true scientist.

Long after his death his spirit lingers outside the Macondo household, remaining as much a presence as when he was alive. This commentary on the meaninglessness of death—several characters remain active after dying—doubles as a wry commentary on the aspect of Latin culture which provides for an entire extended family to be contained under one roof.

Úrsula Iguarán

Úrsula Iguarán is probably the most important character in One Hundred Years of Solitude. She is the story's only voice of sanity and the glue that holds the Buendía family together. She works constantly, caring for all the family's children and overseeing the growing Buendía estate. In addition she runs a business producing small candy animals for the town of Macondo. She is taken for granted absolutely. Her hundred-fifty year life is ended by the realization that for all of her hard work she has earned nothing but the assurance in everyone else that she can be depended upon for hard work.

Ursula is every human being who has been placed in a position to care for another. She is the deep well which exists in each of us that, when tapped enough times without replenishment, collapses under the weight of its own internal vacuum.

Melquíades

A traveling Gypsy who in repeated visits to Macondo introduces fantastic devices and oddities like flying carpets, ice, and enormous magnetized ingots. Upon meeting him José Arcadio Buendía becomes obsessed with alchemy and begins his descent into madness.

Mixed in with Melquíades absurdities are true fruits of science, indistinguishable in the author's prose from extravagances like hens laying golden eggs. The theme of magical realism is concentrated most in Melquíades.

At the beginning of the story Melquíades leaves José Arcadio Buendía with a Sanskrit manuscript containing all of his knowledge, admonishing that its words will take one century to decipher. Thereafter, generation after generation of Buendía exhaust themselves poring over the manuscript, unable to work their way around Melquíades' century-long providence. The contents of Melquíades script are revealed in the book's final paragraph and stand as one of the most beautiful surprises in all of literature.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía

A sociopath and paedophile, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is the archetype of the stone-hearted creatures that are the Aureliano Buendías.

Shortly after entering adulthood Colonel Buendía undertakes the role of a revolutionary, awarding himself the rank of Colonel and engaging the shadow government overseeing Macondo in absurd skirmishes all over the world. Despite losing every war he enters he manages to maintain a small nomadic army, eventually fashioning a reputation for himself as an invincible and elusive god of war. He survives for decades after his zeal has burnt itself out and devotes every second to crafting tiny golden fish in the Buendía household workshop.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía marries his wife practically the instant she menstruates into her underwear for the first time. He is by far the story's most virile character, fathering 18 children—none of them with his spouse.

José Arcadio

José Arcadio inherits the enterprising spirit of his father. Without warning he joins Melquíades' traveling Gypsy troop and returns to Macondo years later, a muscle-bound and tattooed monster of a man. Shortly after his return he supplants Pietro Crespi's campaign of courting his adopted sister, taking her for himself in an effortless swoop.

Like all those who share his name José Arcadio is done in by a violent spasm of his own hubris, committing suicide in the parlor of his home. His death makes itself known with a trail of blood that runs through the streets of Macondo, climbing curbs and wrapping around buildings, finding its way eventually to Úrsula's feet. José Arcadio is left carrying the inexorable stench of gunpowder and his body has no bullet hole.

Remedios the Beauty

Márquez does not even bother describing the tremendous beauty of this woman, allowing instead for the fatal waves it sends through the men of Macondo to stand as evidence. One fellow who migrates to Macondo and is graceful and dignified enough to garner his own following of breathless women becomes so infatuated with her that he withers away with madness, ending up a haggard corpse in front of the Buendía estate. Another, quietly scurrying on the roof for a glimpse of her, sees her full-on nude body and falls to his death.

Remedios the Beauty is amused by the madness that generates around her, finding the romantic treatises that are flung her way extravagant and impractical. She is so simple of character that the concept of romance does not register. The function of custom is lost on her as well; she shuns clothing, shaves her head, and sleeps for months at a time. Remedios the Beauty is the epitome of down-to-earth.

Remedios the Beauty's time in the story is short-lived. One afternoon she begins to blaze with light and ascends into heaven, never to be heard from again.

Aureliano Buendía Babilonia

The Buendía who is able to finally overcome the riddle of Melquíades' manuscripts and crystallize the fatal tempest that wipes Macondo off the face of the Earth.

Aureliano Babilonia is probably the most socially inclined of the Aurelianos, spending much of his time philosophizing with a troop of fellow intellectuals over the countless volumes of esoterica contained in the Buendía family library. He wastes much of his youth in the workshop poring over ancient texts, so that as a young adult he knows nothing of his own time but has the basic knowledge of a medieval man (383).

He develops a crush on his aunt Amaranta Úrsula, but sensing the moral quandary he enlists an enormous prostitute as an outlet for his sexual energy. Eventually he professes his love by sexual assault. Márquez uses Aureliano Babilonia's tremendous sex organ as a segue into the affair that blossoms and spawns the last Aureliano.

Aureliano

The final and shortest-lived link in the Buendía dynasty, the last Aureliano is eaten alive by ants a few minutes after birth. Generations of incest catch up with the Buendía family in the form of a long iguana's tail extending from his spine.

His appearance marks the acceleration of Macondo into ruin; his death punctuates the unstoppable and quickening destruction of the axle that holds together and turns the universe of Macondo.

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Source:
Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York, New York: HarperCollins. 1998.