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Review by Sarah Townshend (part 1)
ReplyDeleteOne Hundred Years of Solitude by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian author, Gabriel García Márquez, follows the lives of the Buendía family for six generations. Fleeing his guilt at having killed a man who insulted him, José Arcadio Buendía and his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, set off with several other young couples on a quest to find the sea. Eventually, mired in the South American jungle and having lost hope of ever reaching the coast, they found the town of Macondo, wherein the rest of the story takes place.
As suggested by the title, time is of great importance in this novel, in particular its fractal and circular nature. Near the end of the book, one of the Buendía descendants finally realises that José Arcadio Buendía, who spent his final years chained to a tree because his family believed him to be mad, was not insane but rather was the only one lucid enough to realise that time 'also stumbled and had accidents'. This preoccupation with time can be found in nearly every event narrated and also, in a manner that would be pleasing to my English lecturers at university, in the narration itself. Márquez's disregard for the popular conception of time as an orderly, linear event, is shown in the way he skips lightly over decades, dwells lovingly on days and regularly makes reference to events that will happen many years in the future, for example the gripping opening line of the novel: 'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice'.
The other key concern of the novel, also indicated in the title, is that of solitude. The fantastic figure of Melquíades, the wandering gypsy who haunts the pages of the novel just as effectively as he haunts the Buendía's house, returns to Macondo after many rumours of his decease, because he 'cannot bear the solitude of death'. Although he does finally die for a second time, his ghost remains as a mournful accompaniment to the lives of successive studious Aurelianos who seek solitude in his alchemist laboratory. Every character in the novel suffers from some form of isolation and loneliness, whether it is social, sexual, physical or emotional. Even the town in which they live, Macondo, is isolated from the rest of the world and its brief flirtation with the train and banana plantation which links it to the outside world results in a more pronounced solitude than ever. The last line of the novel emphasises both time and solitude: '... everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.'
This really is a book that is impossible to judge until the very last page. Up until that moment, although it is highly entertaining and enjoyably written, I wondered quite what the point of the story was. I had chuckled over the description of Colonel Aureliano Buendía's revolution and the insomnia plague, I had writhed uncomfortably under the four-year rain caused by the owners of the banana plantation and had shared the horror of José Arcadio Segundo when he awoke in a train full of corpses, the sole survivor of a massacre, but I still had not quite worked out what the point of the story was. With a neatness and deftness that left me amazed, however, Márquez manages to throw the entire narrative into perspective in the last few paragraphs of the book.
Review by Sarah Townshend continued...(part 2)
ReplyDeleteIt is, perhaps, important to spend a moment on the names of the characters. They all have irritatingly similar names, such as José Arcadio Buendía, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, José Arcadio, Arcadio, Aureliano José, José Arcadio Segundo, Aureliano Segundo and numerous other Aurelianos. The family tree provided at the start of the book is essential, and while reading I constantly had to keep flipping back to it, to check which character I was actually reading about. This repetition of names was definitely a conscious decision on the part of Márquez though, as the characters themselves, Úrsula in particular, comment on the similarity of people with the same names. For example, the Aurelianos tend to be quite, grave and studious, while the Arcadios are daring and boisterous. There is a further symbolism in the repetition of the names which becomes apparent at the end of the book, but I shall not spoil the surprise by mentioning it here.
In terms of genre, it is difficult to classify One Hundred Years of Solitude as to append the usual tags of post-modernism or magical-realism would be like tying concrete blocks to the feet of a butterfly. The free-spirited nature of the story which flits lightly and carelessly between genres should not be fettered by those ponderous literary terms which would certainly make this reader contemplate running a mile, perhaps even in tight shoes, rather than taking up the book. The only genre I would attempt to attach to this novel, and then only gently with a silk leash like Amaranta Úrsula and her trailing husband Gastón, is that of tragi-comedy. Never before have I read anything which so superbly blends the deep despair of human tragedy with that of witty and perceptive comedy. Although Márquez is obviously concerned about the fate of his characters, he distances himself from their fates, so the entire narrative is overlaid with a faint flavour of irony.
In my experience this is going to be a book that you either love or hate. For my part, I loved it. I enjoyed the rich and evocative descriptions of Macondo which magically transformed the inky words on the stagnant page into a colourful, living reality. I could picture vividly each one of the characters as they grew, declined and died, Úrsula in particular. This formidable woman who ruled her family firmly and strongly for over one hundred years, is the closest thing to a central character in the novel. She is the one who brings up every generation of children except the last one and who physically completes the circular nature of time proposed by Márquez. When she finally dies, somewhere between the ages of 120 and 140, she has shrunk so much that she resembles an elderly baby more than a woman. In fact she is so small near the end of her life that the last generation of Buendías, Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano Babilonia, use her as their doll during the four-year rain. Even if you decide, after reading the book, that you belong to the majority of readers who dislike its style or content, it is guaranteed that you will not fail to be moved in some way by this tantalising tale of time, loneliness, love and courage.