100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ursula would weep at the table as if she were reading the letters that had never arrived and in which Jose Arcadio told about his deeds and misadventures. “And there was so much of a home here for you, my son”, she would sob, “and so much food thrown to the hogs!” But underneath it all she could not conceive that the boy the gypsies had took away was the same lout who would eat half a suckling pig for lunch and whose flatulence withered the flowers.
Odds are, when people think of “magic realism” (the use of impossible or supernatural plot elements, described as if they were no more unusual than things that happen understandably in real life) in literature, this is the primary example that comes to mind. It’s certainly the most famous, though not the first, example of the genre ever written. For some reason, it thrives in Latin America more than anywhere else, and Garcia-Marquez got the Noble Prize mainly on the strength of this book.
It takes a family that settles in and becomes the primary family of a remote area surrounded by swamps and mountains and takes it to a place of epic meaning and futility, absorbing life, the universe and everything into a troy loosely based on the history of Colombia. It definitely covers more than 100 years, since one of the main characters lives to be well over a hundred years old and the story continues for a generation after her death. Also, with all the bustling, wars, labor disputes and family squabbles, there isn’t much solitude until the final chapters, when enough people have died that you can count the remaining few comfortably. You have to concentrate to keep track of the characters, since the male progeny of the original Jose Arcadio Buendia are all named Jose, or Arcadio, or Jose Arcadio, or Aureliano, or Jose Aureliano, or Aureliano Jose, and it’s easy to get them mixed up. Some do nothing, some do great things, and all die in magically real ways after spectacular successes and failures.
There’s something for everybody. My favorite part, of the whole, involves one of the Jose Aurelianos becoming involved with a strike against the United Fruit Company, which really existed, and whose predatory colonialism as described by Garcia Marquez makes the United States Government look like a bunch of wusses. First they bring the Colombian military to shoot thousands of trapped strikers in an enclosed space; then the Fruit Company apologizes and promises to make reparations “as soon as the rain stops”. And so, by order of the Untited Fruit Company, the rain doesn’t stop, like, ever. Years pass. Floods carry away most of the village. Everybody drowns except Jose Aureliano. The fruit company and the history books proclaim that the workers were happy and content and alive the whole time, and then the story moves on to something else.
Triggery for rape, incest and colonial oppression of the indigenous, but in new and different ways. Recommended as more good for you and thought provoking than actually fun, and part of that select canon of books that pretty much everybody would benefit from reading once.
Ursula would weep at the table as if she were reading the letters that had never arrived and in which Jose Arcadio told about his deeds and misadventures. “And there was so much of a home here for you, my son”, she would sob, “and so much food thrown to the hogs!” But underneath it all she could not conceive that the boy the gypsies had took away was the same lout who would eat half a suckling pig for lunch and whose flatulence withered the flowers.
Odds are, when people think of “magic realism” (the use of impossible or supernatural plot elements, described as if they were no more unusual than things that happen understandably in real life) in literature, this is the primary example that comes to mind. It’s certainly the most famous, though not the first, example of the genre ever written. For some reason, it thrives in Latin America more than anywhere else, and Garcia-Marquez got the Noble Prize mainly on the strength of this book.
It takes a family that settles in and becomes the primary family of a remote area surrounded by swamps and mountains and takes it to a place of epic meaning and futility, absorbing life, the universe and everything into a troy loosely based on the history of Colombia. It definitely covers more than 100 years, since one of the main characters lives to be well over a hundred years old and the story continues for a generation after her death. Also, with all the bustling, wars, labor disputes and family squabbles, there isn’t much solitude until the final chapters, when enough people have died that you can count the remaining few comfortably. You have to concentrate to keep track of the characters, since the male progeny of the original Jose Arcadio Buendia are all named Jose, or Arcadio, or Jose Arcadio, or Aureliano, or Jose Aureliano, or Aureliano Jose, and it’s easy to get them mixed up. Some do nothing, some do great things, and all die in magically real ways after spectacular successes and failures.
There’s something for everybody. My favorite part, of the whole, involves one of the Jose Aurelianos becoming involved with a strike against the United Fruit Company, which really existed, and whose predatory colonialism as described by Garcia Marquez makes the United States Government look like a bunch of wusses. First they bring the Colombian military to shoot thousands of trapped strikers in an enclosed space; then the Fruit Company apologizes and promises to make reparations “as soon as the rain stops”. And so, by order of the Untited Fruit Company, the rain doesn’t stop, like, ever. Years pass. Floods carry away most of the village. Everybody drowns except Jose Aureliano. The fruit company and the history books proclaim that the workers were happy and content and alive the whole time, and then the story moves on to something else.
Triggery for rape, incest and colonial oppression of the indigenous, but in new and different ways. Recommended as more good for you and thought provoking than actually fun, and part of that select canon of books that pretty much everybody would benefit from reading once.