One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Originally published in1967, published in English in 1970 (trans. Gregory Rabassa). 432 p.

Rating: 5 stars

Summary: Marquez describes the fictional village of Macondo, from is founding through it’s rise and fall, as seen through the eyes of six generations of the Buendia family. The novel encompasses the wars, revolutions, governments, families, marriages, loves, births, deaths, and religions that complicate and/or enrich life along the way.

Review: This is the book that made Marquez famous, and undoubtedly a large part of the reason that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The book is beautifully written, as always, by Marquez.

A high school English teacher of mine once told our class that there are really only two great themes in literature: those of sex and death. Thankfully, Marquez deals with both and more in this novel (and all of his other ones that I have read so far.)

I absolutely loved the reading of this book. It was never boring, never tedious, and the chapters always ended right when they needed to. In the same breath, I feel as if I have just read the entire history of a civilization. Oh wait, I have.

The Buendias are richly described characters, with personalities so specific that one could easily follow Ursula’s train of thought as she mused on how a younger Aureliano has the pensiveness of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, or how a younger Jose Arcadio has the size and strength and brashness of the original Jose Arcadio Buendia, or how there is yet another heartbreaking beauty that wants nothing to do with love or marriage or carnal pleasures.

The supporting cast-members, especially the female characters, are every bit as important as the blood Buendias. Pilar Ternera, Petra Cotes, Santa Sofia de la Piedad, and Fernanda del Carpio are the most important, being the lovers/the wives/the mothers of various Buendias. The role of women in the book is very interesting because Marquez really shows how much each of the women affect the family for better or worse, and how they affect the non-Buendia characters they come across. The women are stereotyped as Madonnas or whores (quite literally, some of the women die of old age yet are still virgins, while others of the women have roles as whores, and even though they bear and help raise children, are never considered equals in the family.)

One thing that I love about Spanish-language authors, and about Marquez in particular, is their use of magical realism. Although this novel doesn’t make as much use of it as some of Marquez’ other works, it makes its appearance in a heavenly disappearance, the presence of ghosts, and in the matriarch’s incredibly long lives. The two main matriarchs of the Buendia family, Ursula and Pilar Ternera, live well over 100 years, taking care of their family. Those are some strong women indeed. The magical realism elements are stylistic, but are appreciated as long as they are taken as something that although magical, had the possibility of actually happening.

The only part of the novel that I found regrettable is one that I also found charming: the character’s names. I was forever turning back to the family to figure out which “Aureliano” or which “Jose Arcadio” Marquez was talking about, and who their parents and grandparents were so that I could place them within the context of the other characters. All I can think is if there were multiples of most of the names, couldn’t more of them have had nicknames?

One interesting quirk about the novel: there is a character who is thought to be named Gabriel Marquez; we are told that his name is Gabriel (he is a friend of the second the last Aureliano) and that he bonds with Aureliano because of the friendship between their great-great grandfathers, Colonel Aureliano Buendia and Gerinaldo Marquez. A character named after himself…interesting.

In 1967, The New York Times’ William Kennedy hailed One Hundred Years of Solitude as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race." Although I’m not sure it should be required reading, it was damn good.