One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a work of magic.....
BOOK REVIEW
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a work of magic. Now, when one speaks of magic it conjures up certain images … of fairy dust and enigmatic elfish beings. It certainly doesn’t bring forth anything resembling reality. Gabriel Garcia doesn’t seem to share this view. One HundredYears of Solitude speaks of an enchanted but rather saturnine place, which follows reality as closely as possible all the while being entrenched in enchantment.
The book follows the lives of five generations of the Buendia family as they navigate love, life and at times, their own forsaken destiny. It has received many accolades throughout the years; William Kennedy called the book “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading material for the entire human race” To understand why all you have to do is consider the opening sentence of the book for a moment.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”
In this sentence Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks of the past, the present and the future simultaneously. Time jumps and hops as a living thing. This line not only shows us that linear timelines are not the only ones that matter when it comes to storytelling, it also brings forth another interesting notion: the idea that the past is coloured by those who have the privilege of recording it. And they are not always right. Consider the use of the word “discover”. Colonel Aureliano Buendia discovering ice is as plausible as you or I “discovering the sun”. Ice is not a human creation and was not “discovered”. But with the use of this word, Gabriel Garcia shows us how history is made; by individual perspectives and often laced with fantasy
Gabriel Garcia speaks of extraordinary events with the same matter of fact tone one might use to recall what he had for breakfast. In other words he describes the abnormal as if they were normal; As if a rain of yellow flowers is a daily occurrence. The mundane mingles with the fantastical in this book. This genre is known as Magical realism.
One hundred years of solitude entwines love, life destiny and magic in a kind of trap that is hard to escape from. Much like the trap of nostalgia that the book brings up from time and time again. And like a trap, this book is not exactly what you or I would call happy and hopeful; instead it talks of the kinds of truth that need to be told. This book is more than just a made up tale of spirits. It’s a fictionalized story of Latin America’s struggle to emerge from Colonialism that allows us to look at history from the perspectives of both the colonizer and colonized, thus coming back to our original point of how history is coloured by personal influences. Riddled with details and tainted with dark undertones, One Hundred Years of Solitude is an essential classic novel to read.
