Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, a tour de force in literary province, is sui generis as one of the most transcendent and brilliant conceptions in the chronicles of great penmanship. It tells the tale of the genesis and the crumbling, of an illusionary town called Macondo, an impalpable fold in the grand tapestry of human civilization. The fallacies and triumphs of Macondo and its inhabitants are infused with life through the epic portrayal of the Buendia family, its trials and tribulations.
The story trickles through a dendritic family tree which ramifies into characters who are both amusing and poignant at the same time. The book straddles six generations of the Buendias, the looking glass through which the author manifests the surgence and the eventual dissemination, of the tiny Macondo.The leitmotiv of the novel pivots around these quixotic and hedonistic men and women, with whose dreams and downfalls, the reader becomes imbued. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the patriarch of this prolific family, is the harbinger of the timeless tale that sweeps across the deluge- ridden, plague afflicted, politically inspired land of Macondo. His wife, Ursula, is that pervasive shadow through the length of its history, which embodies the conscience, spirit and resolve of the town and the Buendias alike. The men in the family are recurrently named Arcadio or Aureliano and the women Remedios or Amaranta, but each person is archetypal in his/her singularity, the quintessential factor that etches every character into the reader’s psyche and soul. Along the intellectual and the cultural march that the author carries us through, we stumble upon incidental role-players and characters that colour the piebald mosaic of the story. Melquiades, the enigmatic and erudite gypsy, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, the enamoured and politically astute veteran, Pilar Ternera, the sinfully alluring, prophesying house maid are all exquisite lacework along the seams of the beautiful embroidery that the author weaves.
As the story unfolds, the reader drifts in and out of a reverie, a fantastical chimera that Gabriel Garcia Marquez builds with the legerdemain of phantasmagoric words. The tangible reality is silhouetted by an ethereal magic and the distinct nuances tend to get murky as one flips through the pages. The supernatural levitation of Remedios the Beauty while hanging out laundry, the blight of Insomnia that plagues the entire population, the stream of blood that percolates through laborious miles and landscapes, rain that lasts four years, are all products of an unbridled imagination, where death is treated with a disarming indifference and the discovery of magnetism has a life-altering impact. The author heralds a quaint style in the writing genre that has been popularly called “Magical Realism”. Nevertheless this extravagantly intoxicating story has scintillating flashes of scientific sobriety, when an infant is born with a pig’s tail as a consequence of recessive genes coming to the fore, in procreation by consanguineous partners. The most profound truths are veiled in the gossamer of melancholic absurdity.
The book is a magnum opus in Latin-American literature and could be either a subliminal or an affected attempt by the author at evincing the neo-colonialist spirit of the insecure Mexican. Macondo’s virgin foray into the political arena, conceives the primordial right and left wing intellect, with its conservatives and liberalists painting their houses in red and blue to mark their political allegiance. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, a paladin of the liberalists’ cause, is a quirky, endearing, gallant hero whose war escapades are a source of humour, tainted with a mild despondence. A proletariat aura prevails through the book, as the overtly Marxist author rejects the fascist realism of the colonial western world and conjures up an avant-garde history for Macondo, that embraces the unrealistic, fanciful, Anti-Western perspective.
A conscientious reader’s chaste predilections might be seriously offended by the incestuous overtones that the novel is rife with. Instances of Oedipal syndrome and the careless abandon with which the characters indulge their sensual fantasies can be causes for discomfiture on the reader’s part. But the erotic turbulence, with which the overwhelming passions of the characters are delivered, sucks the reader into a quagmire that is both wickedly titillating and dangerously sinful, one that never fails to swamp him/her completely with its tempestuous carnality.
As the story progresses from the heart-warming naiveté of Jose Arcadio Buendia as he tries to extract all the gold from the earth with his “new fangled” magnet, through the travails of love and valour, into the world of airplanes and fashion, the readers wear their heart on their sleeves, smiling silently at the simplicity and weeping subconsciously at the sufferings, of Macondo and its inhabitants. From its inception as a village of twenty houses to its tragic destiny, Gabriel Garcia Marquez paints in our hearts, the solitude and misfortunes of Macondo, as it ebbs into the twilight of existence.
A truly funny, sad tale…Kudos!