One Hundred Years of Solitude

About this book

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." It is typical of Marquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice & many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry & a suicide that defies the laws of physics: "A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps & climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right & another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed thru the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch w/the begonias & passed w/out being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jose, & went thru the pantry & came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread. 'Holy Mother of God!' Ursula shouted." The story follows 100 years of Macondo, a village founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia & occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, Jose Arcadio & Aureliano, & grandsons, Aureliano Jose, Aureliano Segundo & Jose Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Ursulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda & Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it's possible for a novel to be highly comic & deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years does the trick. Civil war rages thruout, hearts break, dreams shatter & lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding thru the vibrant colors of Marquez' magical realism. Consider the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom Jose Arcadio Buendia has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendia's house, searching anxiously for water w/which to clean its wound. Buendia's wife, Ursula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, & from then on she placed water jugs all about the house." With One Hundred Years of Solitude Marquez introduced Latin American literature to a worldwide readership. Translated into over 24 languages, his brilliant novel of love & loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature.--Alix Wilber (edited)