February: One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
I think this is the first Gabriel Garcia-Marquez work that I read but it’s not my first time with magic realism. Although the book is long, the sentences extend into paragraphs, and it had been a slow read for me spanning months, I really liked it. My only mistake was that I took a long time reading it so I have forgotten parts of the book when I continue where I left of.
Garcia-Marquez should be read carefully. In this book, he employs a repetitive device. His characters are named the same, kind of like John Arnold’s History: A Very Short Introduction, but not only do succeeding generations inherit the names of their forefathers, so do they inherit the character excess and defects, as well as their destinies. Sociology would tell you we are shaped by our family before we are shaped by society and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez has overemphasized that point in this book. I realized almost 100 pages into the book that there is no point remembering who the different Aurelianos and Arcadios are. What was more crucial was that the Aurelianos and Arcadios are all the same.
He also writes about the circularity of time--that history repeats itself in the people whose fates are repeated. The Arcadios are all impulsive, more appetitive than intellectual, men of action; juxtaposed against the Aurelianos who are more thoughtful, thinkers, rational, less likely to be obsessed with food and sex. And then there are the women, though never as many as the men, Rebeca and Remedios are infantile, Amarantas are more level-headed, but Ursula is the strongest, most practical, especially Ursula Iguaran who is always the force that keeps them all together. She renovates the house multiple times, takes care of the children, works to get food on the table. She’s even more influential than the men. Ultimately, as their names and characters get repeated, so do their tragedies.
And then there are the outside women who is in charge of sexual education for the Buendia men--Petra Cotes and Pilar Ternera. I liked this book because it is not shy, it doesn’t hold back when giving women the power. You don’t have flat characters here so even if it tells the story of a town through the lives of the Buendia family and it can get draggy, there is no shortage of interesting people that breathe life into Macondo.
I also had no idea you can describe solitude in so many ways. Solitude here is isolation, the seemingly incapacity for love, the feeling loneliness, hopelessness, solitude is mourning, yearning, despair, melancholy and you can see it personified in the different members of the Buendia family.
