I just finished reading one of the masterpiece by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and as you have guessed it correctly, it is none other than “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. So this article is an honest and naïve attempt to summarize this novel. To be honest, I couldn’t stop myself from writing about it. So here is it.
This is a novel with no single main character in focus as you would find in other. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has ingeniously webbed the characters that the readers are susceptible to confusing one character to another, especially with the names that often repeats in the generations, viz. Jose Arcadio, Aureliano, Ursula, and Amaranta. There is an implicit reason behind this repetition which the reader may or may not be able to unearth at the end of the novel. Marquez must have known that this state of confusion will occur among his readers, and that’s why he has included a family tree in the beginning to help the readers to differentiate between the Arcadios and Aurelianos, at least.
The novel is set up in a small town
named “Macondo”, may be in the Latin American region. The town seems to be
founded by the Buendia family around which the entire novel is based upon. The
novel starts with the Buendia’s journey of creating a utopian society, isolated
from the rest of the world for several years since its founding, except for the
occasional visits by the gypsies bringing to the town the technologies and
inventions from other parts of the world. One of the gypsies, most notably,
Melquiades, has been pictured as the most important but easily overlooked character,
both by the Buendia in the novel as well as by the readers because as it seems
most of the transformations and generations of the Buendia family almost had
some reference to Melquiades’ deserted workplace, which used to be ultimately
the place for solitude to at least any one of the Buendia’s generations, from
the first one Jose Arcadio Buendia to the supposedly last one, Aureliano.
It may differ on the readers’
individual perception, but it appears that, at the end of the novel, it was
none other than Melquiades who was narrating the entire events throughout the
hundred years that happened in the lives of Buendias. The final Aureliano realizes
the encrypted message left behind by the Melquiades in the parchments to the
first generation of Buendia. Upon the horrific view of his newly born child
from his wife (who was actually his aunt) Amaranta Ursula, where the newborn
was eaten by ants, it is shown at that prodigious instant Melquiades’ final
keys were revealed to Aureliano and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly
placed in the order of man’s time and space: The first of the line is tied
to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants. And as you can find
somewhere in the middle of the novel that the first Buendia goes insane and his
family binds him to the chestnut tree where he dies. Considering all these
instances, the author has mysteriously slipped in the prophecies and the
mysterious manuscripts by Melquiades as the ultimate text of the novel. In fact,
the hundred years of solitude was predicted for the Buendias by Melquiades. Melquiades
turns out to be the gypsy from Oriental world and his manuscripts were found to
be in Sanskrit which the Buendias have been trying miserably to decode for
generations to generations.
The fate of Macondo town closely
resembles to the Buendias’. From the utopian and isolated from the rest of the
world, the village loses its magical-charm and innocence, and most importantly,
its solitude state as it comes to contact with other parts of the world. Civil
wars begin. Death, which was never heard of takes over the town. Politics take
over. And behind all these unpleasant
events, Buendia offspring seems to be responsible.
Marquez has been generous in providing
the readers with the details of the events in the lives of the Buendias from
the birth to death, love affairs to marriages, and fantastic of all, the wild
love making scenes which seem almost real. Sometimes it also appears that there
is incestuous relationship among the Buendias’ generations which Ursula was
always fearing that such relation will bear children with pig’s tails—the fear
that lingers throughout the books—which ultimately happens with the final
generation of Buendia with which the novel ends. Just as with the turbulent
history of Buendia generations, the town faces the similar fate, and with the
hurricane, the existence of Macondo and Buendias come to a tragic end, only to realize
that the entire events were just being played out of the predetermined
prophecies of a cycle from happiness and utopia to the tragic and sorrowful
end.
In order to truly appreciate the
horizon of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one must read this masterpiece One Hundred
Years of Solitude”. Let me quote you one
of the lines from the final pages of the novel that shows the author’s ability
to capture the readers’ mind with his attention to details (you can find plenty
of such throughout the novel:
“He
put the child in the basket that his mother had prepared for him, covered the
face of the corpse with a blanket, and wandered aimlessly through the town, searching
for an entrance that went back to the past.”
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is
truly a masterpiece.
As commented by The New York Times, “Should
be required reading for the entire human race”.
Trust me… You wouldn’t regret a single
moment you invested reading this magical book by Marquez.
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