Brief Birthday Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Today would have been Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 91st birthday. (He died in 2014.) In his honor then, here's what I wrote shortly after I read his most famous novel, probably about 20 years ago. What I wrote was quite brief, basically a capsule.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Nobel-Prize Winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is, I dare say, one of the most famous books of, well, the past One Hundred Years. I've read some shorter stuff by Marquez in the past, and only liked it indifferently. But this is his magnum opus, by most accounts his finest work, and I was looking for something "big" to read.

It's quite a remarkable book. It took me a while to let the comic spirit of the book take over: it's really is a comic novel, and I originally approached it too solemnly. On the other hand, once I thought it was purely comic, the atrocities started to occur. The book is full of outsize characters, and outsize events. Much of the book tells of an extended Civil War, and also there are many murders, a horrifying massacre, absurd accidents, women dying in childbirth, incest, ...  The scope of imagination is enormous, and quite original. The book is about one family, the Buendias, and the town, Macondo, that their patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, founds. The entire history of the town is detailed, and this is also the history of this family. As I said, it is at one important level very comic, but, even aside from the atrocities, its quite sad as well.

Fantastical events occur throughout, which result in the book being called "Magical Realism".  There is a lot of debate over whether MR is just fantasy by someone who doesn't want to be lumped in with genre writers, or something separate. I would argue strongly for the latter: MR, as represented by this book, has a strongly different "feel" from fantasy. One explanation is that the use of the fantastic is something of a political strategy -- an argument that I think might be convincing as to the motivations of the writers, but which doesn't seem helpful is explaining the effect of the strategy on the reader. That is, the Magical Realist aspects transcend any political (especially locally or historically political) aspect.

The main problem I had with One Hundred Years of Solitude was a certain difficulty in becoming absorbed with the characters.  They are so unusual, so obsessed with things I have little sympathy for, that, while I stayed interested in them, I was never fully involved. Despite that, though, this is a fascinating, and thought-provoking novel, and one which I think will stick with me, and grow in memory. I should add that the much praised translation, by Gregory Rabassa, seems to me (not a Spanish reader) to be very successful. [And I can only say that, yes, the novel has stuck with and grown in my memory, in such a way that I consider it a very great novel now.]