One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
8/10 - I liked this book a lot, although sometimes I found it difficult to read. A lot of characters share similar names, and their narratives weave in and out of chronological order. The book tells a whirlwind story that starts with a couple and their young sons and ends 5 generations later. While much of what happens in the book sounds roughly historically accurate, many aspects also contain an element of magic. Characters see ghosts and predict the future, mysterious plagues hit the town, and some events can only be explained through the supposively impossible.
We've only recently entered a reality where we expected most things to make sense, to be explainable by science. Yet, most of our ancestors lived in a far more fantastical reality, and Marquez does a beautiful job capturing this. As time passes in the novel, less magic seems to occur, so that by the end, they may have well been living in the banal reality of the late twentieth century. I don't know much about the history of northern South America -- although the book never specifies a global location, based on Marquez's background, I think it's safe to say that the fictional town of Macando is set in Columbia -- I felt like this book gave a glimpse into how life has changed in the last 150 years in the area.
The story starts with Jose Arcadio Sr. and his wife Ursula. Although it follows the Buendia name, if the story is about any one individual character, it would be Ursula, the strong matriarch who holds the family together. (Spoiler) It is after her death that the family really starts to fall apart and reach their ruin. It is Ursula who ties her husband to the tree when he goes mad, who raises the kids, grand-kids, great-grand-kids and beyond, who earns money for the family and keeps the house in good shape. She is the only one who can speak reason or spark fear in her unruly descendants, in turn giving her a great deal of power over how the town is governed. During her lifetime, the house and family are joyous because of her hard-work and spirit. J.A. Sr. (and Ursula) are the founders of Macondo, the town where all events of the book take place. After a fight that ends in the other man's death, Jose Arcadio and a group of men set out to establish a new town. After much wandering, they start Macondo, a very happy place where, under Jose Arcadio's leadership, everything is fair.
It seems as though both Jose and Ursula have some sort of family history in their old town, although they distinguish themselves from the Indians, so they are not fully indigenous. They speak Spanish, so they are likely descendants of colonizers who have been living in South America for at least a few generations. Their European heritage is never mentioned. Later in the novel, more colonists, this time English speakers, come to Macondo to set up banana plantations. There is also some mentions of dwindling, suffering, and resisting Indigenous populations, but they are mostly spoken about like second class citizens. There are two Indigenous characters that work as servants, maybe slaves, for the Buendia's, before they even become very wealthy. They arrive of their own free will, looking to escape their village which is over run with a horrible plague (historically accurate) that causes insomnia and eventually delirium (probably not historically accurate). One of these characters stays until their death, serving the family, utterly devoted, very one-dimensional. In another part of the book, an Indigenous military leader is killed because Aureliano I, Ursala's son, thinks he is too fearless, too savage, too much of a natural leader, who might divert power from himself. The Buendia's are both colonizers and colonized. They show no awareness of this -- no sympathy for or affinity with the Indigenous people. If they have indigenous roots, they do never acknowledge it.
When the banana company moves into town, there is very little concern about it at first. The banana company is an obvious colonizer: they set up their own village, separate from Macondo, with an imported design. They establish a stricter government and they over work their employees. However, none of the Buendia's work for the company, so the working conditions are not of big concern to the narrative. Ursula's great-great-grandchild, Meme, is friends with the daughters of the banana company executives, so she spends time over in their posh village. It isn't until Aureliano I, the retired revolutionary, starts talking a big game against the banana company, that the family is really pulled in. Of his 17 sons, born across the country to different women, all of whom were hoping to birth a military leader as great as Aureliano, all but one are killed by the government to prevent an uprising. Jose Arcadio Segundo (who is actually the third Jose Arcadio), Ursula's great-grandchild, also tries to stand up to the banana company by helping to organize strikes. The way the banana company saga ends, though, is interesting and a little puzzling to me. The banana company gathers all the strikers together in the town center, closes all the exists, and massacres every single one of the workers and their families. Segundo wakes up in a train full of dead bodies, the only survivor, and escapes, only to find that no one has heard of the massacre. Years later, the massacre becomes a wild myth, erased from all textbooks and the common memory. The banana company promises to resume production right after the rain finishes. However, the rain continues for years, and the banana company quickly abandons the site. The narrator claims that the banana company can control the weather, and purposefully causes the years of rain. This makes me think that the banana company murdered the strikers because their organized power was too much to handled, but they also couldn't risk news of a successful strike spreading. They had to abandon the town because the sudden lack of workers would have been suspicious, so the executive caused the rain to create an excuse to leave, to plunge the town into such soggy disparity that no one would question the absences of so many people. I don't know why Marquez would give the banana company power over the weather, since by this time, less and less magic is happening in Macondo. Perhaps it is just a metaphor for the overarching power that capitalist colonizer exercise over an area. Their plantations often have huge environmental effects, although typically these fall short of changing the rain.
The town never fully recovers from this colonization, although, years later, people blame the town's trouble on the banana company leaving, not it's arrival, the massacre, the changing government, or the rain. This, of course, is a classic way to misremember history. Only those of us with a bird's eye view can be certain of what happened and why, and even I remain unsure in this case.
If I was to read this book again, I would highlight every time Marquez uses the word solitude. At the end of the book, I am still wondering who spent a hundred years in solitude. It is hard to track time in this story, but it may be 100 years from when Melquíades writes the prophecy of the Buendia family and when Aureliano IV, Ursula's great-great-great grandchild, final deciphers it. Perhaps it is Aureliano I, the revolutionary war leader, the father who out lives his 18 sons, the introvert, late bloomer, alchemist and gold-fish maker, who lives in the most solitude. Or perhaps it's Ursula, cursed to watch her descendants repeat the same mistakes. Or maybe it's the first Jose Arcadio, who fluctuates between a responsible and fair leader and a self-important mad scientist, who goes mad and must be tied to a tree behind the house. There he ultimately dies, but his ghost lives on in the house. Many of his descendants are similar: flipping between greatness and obsession, responsibility and madness. Spending years serving the community and then years locked away. Still, it is Ursula who I feel the most for: she's the only steady one, always working for her family, always caring about others. Alone in her true sense of responsibility to the family.
The book also has a lot of weird incest things. From the gate, we learn that Ursula and Jose Arcadio are cousins. For months after their marriage, Ursula wears chastity underwear to prevent her husband raping her in fear that their child will have the tale of a pig. The book often puts women in this role of protecting themselves from the desires of the men in their life. No one is safe from lust. Twice, nephews fall in love with their aunts, who worry that the boys will rape them in the night. Amaranta, Ursula's daughter, practically raises Aureliano Jose, Aureliano I's illegitimate son, and he becomes obsessed with her. The narrator implies he develops these feelings because of Amaranta's carelessness: she is often naked in front of him as he gets older, and she lets him cuddle her, enjoying the way it feels to be touched by a warm body. Llittle Aureliano II develops deeply sexual feelings for Amaranta, who rejects them strictly and dies a virgin. Amaranta's lack of romantic companionship is a self-designed punishment for the suicide of a lover who she rejected harshly, despite leading him on and developing affection for him. This is one of many examples of women being punished for their relationship with sex, something I will come back to soon. Three generations later, the same thing happens between Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano IV. Amaranta II, a free-wheeling young women who loves having sex with her older, wealthy European husband, ultimately chooses to be with her cousin. Their passionate sex leads to the last Buendia: a little boy who is born with a pig-tail, just like Ursula worried about all those years ago. Amaranta II dies in child birth, and Aureliano IV, loses himself in grief. The new born is neglected and eaten by ants, just before Aureliano is killed in his ancestral home by a wind storm. This is how the book ends, as Aureliano IV translates Melquíades' prophecy: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants. It is unclear, apparently, if Amaranta and Aureliano know they are related. Although Amaranta always grew up with little Aureliano around, his origins are unknown, because Amaranta's sister birthed him in a nunnery and her mother, Fernanda, kept his origins a secret because of the shame of his illegitimacy. However, he has the family name and the resemblance, so I don't believe they truly didn't know.
Now, to talk about the misogyny in the book. Ursula ultimately allows Jose Arcadio to have sex with her because she worries that with out that outlet, Jose Arcadio is prone to recklessness. She does not have sex because she desires him. Amaranta II at first rejects Aureliano IV, but one night he sneaks into her room, and at first she fights him off, but then she lets the fighting become sex. The scene is framed as consensual, because Amaranta's husband is the other room, so at any time, if she had made any noise of distress, he could have come to her rescue. We are left to assume that she secretly wants it. She is one of a few female characters in the book who enjoys sex, and she is ultimately punished for it: she loses her husbands, has a son with a pig tail in a dilapidated house, and then shortly thereafter dies. The other sex lovers include Pilar Ternera, the old prostitute who bears a child by both Aureliano I and Jose Arcadio II. While she lives a decent life, she works hard, never finds love, and neither Buendia boy knows her as their mother. Petra Cotes is another: she is refered to as Aureliano Segundo's -- truly Aurelieno III, Ursula's great-grandson, Amaranta II's father -- concubine. She is dark-skinned, perhaps why she does not become his wife, and the love of his life. Even after he marries Fernanda, Amaranta II's mother, he spends the majority of his time with Petra. Their passionate sex is a key part of their relationship, but Petra never bears a child. Later in life, when they have lost most of their wealth in the rains, Petra and Aureliano often go hungry to afford fine meals and objects for Fernanda and the children. After her lover dies, Petra continues to care for Fernanda until her death, because despite their mutual diastase for each other and Petra's poverty, Petra feels obligated to care for what Aureliano III loved. Perhaps the most depressing example, however, is of Meme, Amarana II's older sister and the mother of Aureliano IV. She falls in love with a man who works at the banana company, and they enjoy sex together. When her mother, Fernanda finds out, she locks Amaranta away in the house, but every day, her lover sneaks in and they have sex in the bathroom. When Fernanda finds out, she has a guard keep watch and they shot the man when he enters the property. Amaranta is send away to a nunnery, and she never says another word, lost so deep in grief that not even the birth of her son can make her speak.
Unfinished, but publishing anyways
