Re-read review: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

 

By all rights I should adore this book. After all, I’m a big fan of social commentary mixed with humor, magical realism, lyrical writing, and Latin American literature; this is a classic that features all those things. However, while there are indeed many parts I enjoyed, my previous 1.5 reads felt a bit like a slog through the jungle. This latest reading was faster and more enjoyable, but I also now know why I had some difficulty with the story as a whole.

 

Things that justifiably make this a classic:

- Gorgeous writing. The first sentence is often held up as an example:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

It immediately draws you in with the mix of verb tenses and the questions it provokes: Why is this guy about to be executed? What does he mean “discover ice”¹?

- An interesting premise. The title refers to the Buendía family, who founded and dominate the isolated town of Macondo for a century. Each of the Buendías is, in varying ways, out of step with the people and world around them, giving them a lonely quality despite the size and influence of the family. The world also comes to Macondo in isolated bursts, giving it time to develop eccentricities. Both factors are reflected in…

- Colorful characters. You can’t help but like the patriarch, Josè Arcadio (the first – but more on that in a minute), who is fascinated by all knowledge and inventions no matter how esoteric and useless, and his practical, long-suffering wife Ursula. Rebeca, a young girl who arrives mute and carrying a sack of her parent’s bones, is an intriguingly gothic addition. Aureliano Segundo is an exuberant hedonist with two contrasting households. Not all the characters are likeable, but if you enjoy the quirky and the strange, the cast of this book has you covered.

- The usually humorous, sometimes disturbing, absurdity. For example:

Josè Arcadio Buendía did not succeed in deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered ice…in the near future they would be able to manufacture blocks of ice…and with them build the new houses of the village. Macondo would no longer be a burning place, where the hinges and door knockers twisted with the heat, but would be changed into a wintry city.

But first – time to teach his sons alchemy!

Under the apparently magical influence of his mistress, Aureliano Segundo’s farm animals breed so rapidly the entire patio can become covered with rabbits overnight. A young girl and her lover are trailed by mysterious clouds of yellow butterflies, while her uptight mother corresponds with “invisible doctors”. Various members of the family chat with ghosts who linger around the mouldering house. And so on.

- The political and economic commentary. This aspect of the book starts when a fraudulent election kicks off a civil war between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The participants seem to start off with clear ideological principles but soon get extremely muddled, with the country ending up pretty much exactly where it started:

The revolutionaries knew the truth, Colonel Aureliano Buendía better than any of them. Although at that moment he had more than five thousand men and held two coastal states, he had the feeling of being hemmed in against the sea and caught in a situation that was so confused that when he ordered the restoration of the church steeple, which had been knocked down by army cannon fire, Father Nicanor commented… “This is silly; the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt”.

Even the Buendía family itself has muddled principles, with the patriarch having designed the town so that every house had equal shade and access to the river, one of his sons taking others' land by force because he thinks their father should have claimed it anyway, and a second son giving it back.

            An even more gut-wrenching part of the story comes when a banana plantation comes to town. “The suspicious inhabitants of Macondo barely began to wonder what the devil was going on when the town had already become transformed into an encampment of wooden houses with zinc roofs inhabited by foreigners…The gringos…built a separate town across the railroad tracks…surrounded by a metal fence topped with a band of electrified chicken wire.” And soon: “The old policemen were replaced with assassins with machetes”  

Lawyers cunningly defuse complaints about inequality and mistreatment by workers on the plantation – for instance, declaring that they aren’t really employees, but only contractors². The conflicts between the workers and the company culminates in soldiers firing into a crowd of the former. This was based on a real event in 1928 Colombia known as the Banana Massacre. Unsettlingly, though, people are instructed to forget…and almost everyone does, eventually going so far as to insist that there was never a plantation at all! Macondo never fully recovers.

Interestingly, García Márquez held socialist views and was friendly with, though not always uncritical of, Fidel Castro…but this part of the story was inspired by an earlier phase of struggles, as recounted by his Liberal grandfather : “Instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government.” This book was published in 1970, in the same year that Salvador Allende (later overthrown by a CIA-backed coup) was elected in Chile, before the collapse of its Soviet trade partner sent Cuba’s economy into a depression, and well before Nicaragua’s Sandinista politicians began to bear an alarming resemblance to the regimes they once fought against. But that subsequent history sadly only makes the circular pattern of events and people in this book feel all the more prescient.

 

1. Apparently the idea of encountering ice for the first time in a carnival if it were some magical new invention was an autobiographical detail!

2. Something that would NEVER happen in the US today, of course. Nope, not remotely…

 

Three things that made it hard to read:

- The names. Every one of the Buendía men is named some combination of Josè, Aurelio, or Arcadio. There is a purpose to this, reflecting the repetition of history:

While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the Josè Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign.

Ursula starts to strongly suspect that time is going in a circle. Still, despite the family tree provided, it is tiring to try and remember who is who! Even the female names start to repeat after a few generations.

- The “romance”. (Note: In order to be clear about what I'm complaining about, this gets a little gross; content warning for pedophilia & hebephilia, unsettling descriptions of prostitution, incest, dubious consent, and fetishistic racism).

    Just in the first 60 pages there are six instances of sex and/or love, and every single one is extremely screwed up. This ranges from a young Josè Arcadio ordering Ursula out of the chastity belt she’d constructed after being told that marrying her cousin would cause her to birth monsters, blaming her for the fact that he just killed a man who accused him of impotence; to one of their teenage sons getting fondled by a woman who has apparently been pining over her rapist; to their other son falling obsessively in love with a seven-year-old! It would be one thing if this were clearly part of the social commentary, but it is hard to tell. The only one that is written as if it were meant to be horrifying is the case of the young mulatta whose own grandmother sells her to 60-70 men a night, until the skin of her back is raw and she has to wring the sweat out of the mattress.

Things get less icky in the middle of the book, but the romantic pairings remain generally unappealing. There are two seeming exceptions. Petra Cotes is gorgeous and luck-inducing and a terrific match to Aureliano Segundo; their decades-long relationship ranges from unbridled passion to a toned-down but very effective partnership. I don’t know why he didn’t just marry her instead of the uptight and impractical Fernanda. Except, yes, I do: Petra is a mulatta, while Fernanda has a long string of fancy Iberian names. Accurate to the kind of thing that went on in that period, but depressing! Amaranta Ursula seems like a sensible modern woman. She goes off to study in Europe and returns with a rich educated aviator husband named Gaston who she is delighted to bang in every corner of the house at any time of day. But then, of course, she has to go fall for her cousin, give birth to a baby with the tail of a pig, and die of blood loss. Arrgh, why? Pedophilia makes a reappearance later in the book. Amaranta doesn’t have the courage to say yes to any of the grown men who have courted her, but barely manages to reject the advances of her nephew and then ends up molesting her great grand-nephew. When he returns from seminary after her death, he fills the house with children for vague but clearly unsavory purposes, given that they end up bathing naked in champagne at one point while he daydreams about Amarantha. Four of the older ones conspire to drown him and steal his money – so, good for them, I suppose?

This book leaves a lot up to the interpretation of the reader. García Márquez said his aim was to mimic the way his grandmother told stories, where her expression never changed no matter how weird or fantastical the thing she was relating. The ambiguity of how one is meant to feel about these episodes is partly a product of that. It should be noted that “legal age” in the time and place of the story would be roughly equivalent to “old enough to be/get someone pregnant”. Having an interest in pre-pubescent kids was not considered any more normal or good then than it is now, and the book does reflect that, to some degree. As with Remedios’ parents remarking in confusion “We have six other daughters…and Aurelito lays his eyes precisely on the one who still wets her bed” followed by her dying while pregnant, the inter-generational arc from Amaranta to Josè Arcadio #4 getting his comeuppance certainly could be social commentary – especially given that the character who engages in this sort of thing the most is the one who trained as a priest! However, the number of “romantic” episodes involving individuals in their mid-teens, especially when the view lingers a bit on barely-formed breasts or gives a positive connotation to boys getting “initiated” by someone older, was pretty unsettling to read and casts doubt on the narrative role of the pedophilia proper.

- Many of the female characters. I have very mixed feelings about how women are portrayed in this book. Some of them, like Ursula and Petra, I really enjoy – they remind me of my grandmother or other strong, resilient Latinas I’ve looked up to. But too many others have a tendency to utterly lose themselves in a man and can’t seem to find a reason to exist without him – if they ever had another reason to begin with! Now, as with the previous points, this may be partly deliberate, reflecting both the self-destructive tendencies of the Buendías and the patriarchal society in which they live. Certainly, a large part of Fernanda’s unhappiness clearly comes from the way she has uncritically absorbed her overly “proper” upbringing, and the joy-killing practices that come with it.

However, there is a disparity in how sympathetically male and female characters are written. For instance, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is by multiple measures a terrible person: He marries a literal child, fathers 17 illegitimate sons that only Ursula takes any responsibility for keeping track of, continues a war he knows to be futile, allows supposed friends to be executed, and burns down the house of one of their widows when she dares tell him off. And yet...the way that the prose reveals his lonely isolation almost forces the reader to sympathize with him. His sister Amaranta has some of the same flaws, from difficulty emotionally connecting and a tendency toward vindictiveness to inappropriate attraction to much younger people. However, though the harms she causes are much smaller in scale, she is much harder to like, coming off as a bitter spinster rather than a tragic would-be war hero. Fernanda is also really difficult not to hate, even though we know exactly how her upbringing and the strange household she married into have twisted her. Some of the fault may lie in the reader, of course – we are still socialized to blame women more. But the book doesn’t help balance or contradict that possible unconscious bias much!

 

Overall recommendation: This book has been called THE great novel of the Americas. It introduced the concept of “magical realism” to the wider world and had a huge influence on many authors within and beyond the region. So, if you are interested in Latin American literature or just really love beautiful prose, it is probably a must-read. However, this is one of those books that frustrate me more than a mediocre work would because 90% of it is perfect and amazing and the other 10% makes me want to scream. So, I’ll give similar advice as in the case of HP Lovecraft: if any of the caveats I’ve described upset you a lot, you might want to start your exploration of this genre with some later works inspired by this one and perhaps circle back if or when you are in the right mood to handle those elements. I recommend as that starting point the works of Isabelle Allende. 'The House of the Spirits' was my introduction to magical realism, while 'Eva Luna' features a similar dreamlike quality and commentary on common types of political events in Latin America, but with better female characters – including a trans woman with an actual arc of her own! - and a much clearer demarcation of consensual and non-consensual sex (the latter always being deployed carefully in Allende’s novels to make specific points).