A Hundred Years of Solitude is an extremely rich novel bursting with life. Written by the Colombian author Marquez originally in Spanish in 1967, the English translation by Rabassa is highly acknowledged. The novel captures the multigenerational timeline of the fictional Buendia family whose forefather Jose Arcadia Buendio is the founder of a small town Macondo.
Globally translated into more than 40 languages and millions of copies sold worldwide, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a canonical work in Latin American literature due to many reasons, the most conspicous of which would be its inventive blend of magical realism and historical insight. The Buendios represent a family of interesting characters, their lives undergo a series of events that are tied to external cirumstances and domestic family drama. The forefather Jose Arcadio Buendia is an eccentric imaginative man who befriends a mysterious gypsy Melquiades who brings to him ideas and inventions beyond his limited geographical exposure of the world. Thus, starts an epic adventure that encompasses many upheavels, wars, prosperity, disasters, revolutions and rainstorms. Amidst all this mayhem, the narrator steps in and out of the lives of the many members (mostly estranged) of the Buendia family with a narrative style that is subtle and nuanced, making this novel a literary masterpiece that I found profoundly amusing and thought-provoking.
The doomed bloodline is permeated with illegitmate births and inbreeding. The characters are fascinating. There is, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, a man who sacrifices his life to civil war and becomes a relic as he dedicates his old age to making gold fishes in his workshop. His mother Ursula is a woman of formidable strength and resilience who fights the tides of time and keeps the family home intact til her last days. Ursula’s daughter Amaranta is the hardened spinster whose contradictory battles with love make her a puzzling eccentric. I found the female characters quite interesting, most consumed by their own maladies and tragedies. Rebeca, Remedios the Beauty, Fernanda del Carpio, Amaranta Ursula, Petra Cotes, Pilar Ternera and Meme, all reflect absurd personalities that are not so far away from reality. Aureliano Segundo’s extravagant ways, unfaltering passion for his concubine and unhappiness from a frigid wife, followed by abject poverty brings one to ponder the circle of events.
The weaving of the gruesome incident of the banana plant massacre of workers into the novel creates a prolific amalgam of historical fiction, that is, fictional story-telling based on true events. It represents a re-writing of history through the anti-colonialism lens. The presence of dark humor is evident in the text. Yet, the theme of solitude and its role in human existence runs through the novel predominantly, creating a dreamy melancholic effect.
“Time was not passing…. it was turning in a circle.” — Ursula Iguaran(One Hundred Years of Solitude)
If existential murder mysteries are more your pace, Dr. Hamd Syed also reviewed The Brothers Karamazov — Dostoevsky's dense, philosophical classic on morality and free will.
| The author Hamd Syed is an Associate Professor of Human Anatomy moonlighting as an author, poet and book reviewer. She is an avid reader of diverse book genres with a strong interest in philopsophy, psychology and dark academia. She writes on her blog MindPortal and is a published author of the poetry book, "ABSTRACT & Other Poems". |
