Really Magical & Really Real

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

At no point during my reading of this novel did I have any idea how I would possibly write about it. I finished it on Thursday, and at time of writing, I still don’t really know how I’m going to do it. Instead of trying to nail it all down, I’m just going to start, so please accept my deepest apologies in advance if this turns out to be a poorly thought out (or not thought out at all) ramble to nowhere. If you don’t feel like risking it and reading the rest of what I end up writing, I’ll tell you that you should read this book now instead of waiting to the end. Thank you to Dayna McRoberts for giving it to me!

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendía family over six generations. They live in a fictional, magical town called Macondo, which was settled by José Arcadio Buendía himself. It is one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the late 20th century and is considered Garbiel García Márquez’s masterpiece. More than half a million copies sold in Spanish after initial publication, and when it was translated into English, the New York Times named it one of the year’s twelve best books. Since then, it’s been published in 45 other languages and more than 45 million copies have been sold.

I do not give much favor to critical acclaim. Many books praised to the moon and back by the critics don’t interest me—or I disagree—and many books that the critics wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole hold the highest appeal for me. However, this much recognition, both from the critical elite and the book buying public usually indicates that something is worth reading. Smoke doesn’t always mean fire, but if there’s so much smoke you can’t see your hand in front of you, there’s probably a fire.

I have a loose knowledge of Gabriel García Márquez built upon vague remembrances from numerous Spanish literature classes I took in high school and college. Mainly though, aside from reading No One Writes to the Colonel in Spanish in college, most of my vague remembrances come from one high school Spanish class, in which we learned a great deal of Latin American history—more than I think is standard in a high school Spanish class. When it came time for Columbia, we learned about Gabriel García Márquez.

What I remember most clearly were the lessons about the magic realism that García Márquez is so well known for. We also watched a movie that had something to do with tears in the soup…or maybe it was hot chocolate. I can’t remember but I think of it often. Anyway, that was my first introduction to the style, and it’s what allowed me to recognize it in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

García Márquez creates a fantastical world in such a commonplace, matter-of-fact tone, that as a reader you don’t possibly doubt that every item and event recounted, from magic carpets, to 200 year old ladies, to literal transfiguration, must be true to fact. In fantasy, the reader knows that the author knows that the things they’re writing about are made up. In magic realism though, the author invites the reader into a world that they spin into being simply by believing that everything they write about is true and real and possible. At least that’s how it feels.

The lack of any established “laws of reality” in Macondo creates a world so full of imagination and surprise that a 400 page novel that literally has 22 different characters named Aureliano and that takes place almost entirely within the walls of one house, or at least within the limits of one very small, very remote town, deeply entertaining to read. It is so nice to just be along for the ride—to let yourself go and to agree that yes, it is entirely possible that it would rain for four years, eleven months and two days straight.

Another thing about the novel that really stood out to me (to pick one among many) was García Márquez’s deftness with sexual and romantic relationships—sometimes the overlap between the two, and sometimes the lack of overlap. There is a virility in the way that García Márquez writes about sex. His tone does not change—his tone never changes, he tells his whole story with a straight face - but he is able to capture the sane madness that is human sexuality. To me, his sexual thesis claims that once the flame of attraction is lit, it becomes all consuming. This is viewed by some as bad, and by some as good, but in reality, it is neither - it just is.

All-consuming passion, that may have a negative output, can still be a thing of joy, rapture, value and goodness. The most obvious example is that of Meme Buendía and Mauricio Babylonia’s clandestine love affair. The image of swarming yellow butterflies that appear around Meme, in the house, everywhere, whenever Mauricio is near is such a perfect representation of young love and lust. Fittingly, it’s one of García Márquez’s most well-known images. Avoiding spoilers, their time together ends extremely poorly for the both of them, but the literal result of their union (a child), while perhaps not fully positive, is essential to the Buendía saga.

Aside from those young lovers, take the sexual union between José Arcadio and Rebeca, described in more literal terms than the hordes of butterflies. José Arcadio returns from years living among the gypsies and Rebeca is a grown woman—an engaged woman, in fact. His defining quality is his sheer size and bulk. Falling under his spell, “she tried to get near him under any pretext,” and finally, unable to resist went to his bedroom. Their union is described thusly:

“She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three slashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter.

Three days later they were married during the five o’clock mass.” (92)

Úrsula, never forgives her son for marrying her adoptive daughter (reasonable perhaps), but they make a life with each other quite happily, waking up the whole neighborhood with their cries of passion eight times a night and three times a day during siesta. Lasting, life-sustaining passion can spring forth from that momentary sexual passion that people are warned to resist. This same pattern can be seen in Aureliano Segundo’s relationship with his life-long concubine, Petra Cotes. Yes he has a sexual passion for her that he can never resist for long, but they also have a deeper bond, the value of which is predicated upon and heightened by their shared sexuality.

Both within these sexual and romantic relationships and without, the women in this novel operate with a great deal of power. It may be a story about 100 Aurelianos and José Arcadios, but the structure of the whole novel is held up by the women—perhaps the most realistic part of the story. Standing out as the matriarch, there is Úrsula, wife of the first José Arcadio Buendía. For her more than one hundred and twenty years, she sets the tone within the Buendía household, and like most mothers and grandmothers, she has a canny sense for where things stand, what should happen and what will happen. Her counterpart, and the other female ancestor of the Buendía line—though most of the family doesn’t know it—is Pilar Ternera, who stops counting her age after 140. These among other long-living ladies represent the fortitude of the female in García Márquez’s world.

Finally, I found compelling the vein of the book that focuses on the value (if there is value) in the life of a solitary, almost hermetic, scholar, dedicated to the repeated review and attempted deciphering of all of the secrets of the world. I don’t know quite what to make of it, and I can’t say for sure whether García Márquez favors the path or not. Throughout the novel, other characters worry that the Buendía men who get sucked into the room full of parchments have lost their mind, but we are repeatedly told by our narrator that those men are the most sane or lucid people in the house. I will personally say that throughout the novel, when one of the Buendía men would fall into the study of those parchments, I always felt a sense of relief that they were at least out of trouble, and at most, fulfilling their destiny.

I also can’t go without mentioning the other thing that I remember from learning about Gabriel García Márquez in Spanish class. This novel is about the history of Latin America and the legacy that history created and is still creating in many Latin American countries. The civil war and the Banana Company for example are echos (at times very close echoes) of historical events in García Márquez’s home country of Colombia specifically, and representative of patterns that are visible in the history of multiple Latin American countries. Unsurprisingly for an epic of these proportions, these among other socio-political, religious, cultural and economic events and ideas are held up to the light in one way or another.

Reading over this post to make my edits, I keep thinking of more things I should tell you. More and more and more! So I’m going to stop myself. I’ve made it through the enchanted land of Macondo, and I hope you made it with me. I think this probably did turn out a bit rambly, but I don’t think it was a ramble to nowhere. Everything they say (at least all the good stuff) about this book its true. It is fun, funny, sad, confusing, surprising, predictable, entertaining and boring simultaneously and in turns. In that way, even with the more fantastical elements—or perhaps because of them—this novel is like a reflection of life. No matter how outlandish it gets, there’s something recognizable on every page.