One hundred years of solitude

‘Time is the mother and murderer of all things.’
Old Things Forgotten

There is simply too much magic in this book to summarize in a review, it would require an essay and right now I don’t have that kind of time. Still, I will try my best to encapsulate some of the charm it holds.

One hundred years of solitude is set in a fictional village in Colombo called Macondo. The town is founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia, a strong and spontaneous leader. He leads a whole herd of people into Macondo and convinces them that they can inhabit it. One day, a band of gypsies visits Macondo and entertains the small populace with their mesmerizing finds from travelling and the stories they tell of distant lands. The band’s leader, Melquiades, is a very key character from the start of the saga till the very end. It is he who fascinates Jose Arcadio Buendia with his alchemy and revelations of the mysteries of the universe. He brings ice to Macondo where it has never been seen before and this simple commodity completely grips Aureliano Buendia, one of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s sons.

Time passes and Macondo grows into a larger population and boasts of better facilities. The government on seeing this growth tries to interfere with the town’s affairs but Jose Arcadio Buendia doesn’t give in to them and holds them back. Soon, a civil war breaks out and it triggers the set of tragic events for Macondo, especially for the Buendia family. Seven generations of the family sees nothing but tragedy and abnormal situations. This surrealistic allure simply cannot be put down in a review and I personally urge anyone who reads this to go and read the book as well.

The notion of time is very important in the novel as it is metaphorically about the history of Colombia, where the generations of the Buendia family act as timeline milestones. Magical realism also plays a very important part as the plot speaks of ice at first like it was a magical element, of levitation, of civil-wars, bloodshed, sexual-liaisons and all of this seen through the simple eyes of a village. This magical timeline is not in itself about witches and fantasy as such but the slow progression of time throughout the novel is resonant of the inevitability of human life seeing its end, sometimes early and sometimes taking far too long. This fluidity of occasions, celebrations, deaths, weddings, wars, exiles, affairs, disputes…all of it in Macondo…leaves a haunting representation of a town that one knows is after all, fictional. It was this haunting yet charismatic snaring of words that perhaps got Gabriel Garcia Marquez his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.