One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One hundred years of births, deaths, crazed family members, marriages, concubines, marriage refusals, disease, insect destruction, unconquerable nature, and the outside world changing everything and then changing everything again. Throughout that time being ultimately alone, unable to connect fully with others. The things created rust and fall apart and die. Nothing remains of the original desire but a spark that went nowhere. Floating about, living in our own minds more and more, everything is squandered and nothing left for the future. Growing old and living again in senile memories of the past.

One hundred years of existence on this is earth is exactly one hundred years of solitude.

Late in the book, Pilar Ternera explains the Beundia family:

“…the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”

The plot of the book expands from the marriage of Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran as they found a town, raise children and their children’s children. It reaches a peak where multiple generations of Buendias are living and marrying and it seems like the seed that Jose and Ursula planted might survive. Then it collapses and, by the end of the book, all of the Buendias are gone from the earth.

The events of the novel hinge on their personalities and the choices they make, not so much fate or morality intervening in their lives. The characters exist in a sort of godless state:

“They would answer him [the first town priest] that they [the town residents] had been many years without a priest, arranging the business of the souls directly with God, and that they had lost the evil or original sin.”

The characters are strong and dynamic and powerful. Ursula, who lives through most of the events of the book, is the strongest. She is a firebrand who controls her husband Jose’s whims and raises her children and grandchildren (and other children) under her roof. She even intervenes when her prodigy rules the town like a tyrant, thrashing him like a child and taking over until he gradually resumes command. All of the characters are like this, forces of nature, say, whose intense personalities drive the events of the plot.

Many of the outside events, though, are fantastic, such as when Jose Arcadio’s blood traveled through the streets of town, around buildings, into the Buendia’s home, avoiding the rug in the living room, crossing a room where school lessons are underway, all the way to Ursula who follows the trail back to her son’s dead body.

In a different example, the ultimate end of Remedios is fantastic, but perfectly consistent with her character:

“Remedios the Beauty stayed there [in the family house] wandering through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her back, maturing in her dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, her unscheduled meals, her deep and prolonged silences that had no memory until one afternoon in March [she lifted up into the sky with the laundry and simply floated away]...

After years of being apart from her family, living less and less as a physical presence in the household, it would have been difficult to imagine her ending in any other way than as an angel, floating off toward heaven.

The events of the book are heavily foreshadowed. The book begins by referring to when Colonel Aureliano Buendia stands in front of a firing squad, which is then mentioned again throughout the work, but it doesn’t happen until about a third of the way into the book. About the time the firing squad scene is finally described, Marquez hints at the coming of the banana plantation, which arrives some chapters later. Later, red ants arrive to the novel as flying about the town in a swarm. Then, they invade the Buendia house, first slowly, then completely; ultimately, carrying off the last born of the Buendia family. Although many events were fantastical, most were strongly foreshadowed which made me more receptive to them and, more importantly, reinforced a sense of eventual doom settling over the Buendia family.

Marquez’s writing style is, of, course superb. Here he gently and unabashedly describes an aging Pillar Ternera, a prostitute and fortune teller connected to the Buendia family for many years:

“Pillar Ternera had lost the trail of all hope. Her laugh had taken on the tones of an organ, her breasts had succumbed to the tedium of endless caressing, her stomach and her thighs had been the victims of her irrevocable fate as a shared woman, but her heart great old without bitterness. Fat, talkative, with the airs of a matron in disgrace, she renounced the sterile illusions of her cards and found peace and consolation in other people’s lives.”

Marquez is also given to fanciful exaggeration through the novel, such as here when he describes the consequences of an interminable rainstorm that plagued the town causing everything to be wet beyond all description but his:

“…the driest of machines would have flowers popping out among their gears if they were not oiled every three days, and the threads in brocades rusted, and wet clothing would break out in a rash of saffron-colored moss. The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows.”

It’s been said that a writer should never describe sex until he or she wishes to turn their novel blue. Here, Marquez describes the act of the first sexual encounter between Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Ursula, without turning his writing prurient, keeping the description consistent with the characters’ personalities and their complex situation:

“A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like. She barely had time to reach out her hand and grope for the towel to put a gag between her teeth so that she would not let out the cat howls that were already tearing at her insides.”

Ultimately, the novel is optimistic. Marquez finds meaning in life where many novelists have: love. His characters clearly reject god as a source of fulfillment; family and community are denied them. Even education and careers are ultimately meaningless. The love shared among and between the characters of the book is finally the only thing that survives their one hundred years of solitude.