Not many books that I have come across are fast-paced, intriguing, mysterious, bewildering, climactic, anti-climactic, unpredictable yet predictable, and a host of other adjectives, at the same time. About eight years ago, when I first picked up a copy of 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the teenager in me found the first book I could not bear to read. Yet, today, the very same novel was a gripping page-turner. Gregory Rabassa’s translation of the original was so enchanting that it hardly struck me that English wasn’t the original language it was written in.
Nevertheless, this isn’t a book I would recommend to people when they quite often ask me “Suggest me a good book to read.” For starters, there is just too much going on for the brain to process. It takes utmost patience to read through, understand and internalise every sentence in this novel because it is loaded with information. You expect a novel to have a generous sprinkling of dialogues between people but this novel looks more like an academic reading.
Right at the onset, when you plunge into the story, you realise that you’re entering an imaginary and supernatural world on Earth. This realisation helps you keep a grasp on the floating (literally) incidents that keep occurring over the course of almost more than a century. The story of the Buendia family does flow in a forward narration right from the time of Jose Arcadio Buendia up until the last story of Aureliano Babilonia, but every now and then it flits across time, not just as a flashback but even fast forward. Even before you are acquainted with the characters, Marquez gives you a hint of their future, in some cases even their death, such as in the case of the firing squad that Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to face, Rebeca’s life-long isolation, Ursula’s survival for all seven generations and Amaranta’s spinsterhood. The magical elements are enough to charge up the emotions of readers and so this anti-climatic foretelling, which sounds similar to the alienation effect used by Bertolt Brecht, is a good way to bring them back to the real bits of the novel.
Now, I’ve grown up watching Bollywood movies, so I don’t have to work hard to suspend my disbelief willingly; we do that a lot and move on with life. So, although I was reading through a story where kids are born with a pig’s tail, or as iguanas, women ascending into heaven, half-human half-animal species being killed, magical objects being thrown about, etc they didn’t make me guffaw. They got me more intrigued into this magical-realistic world that I was submerging into, not very different from my own country’s history.
While reading through seven generations of Aurelianos and Arcadios, all of whom end up dead in the most unbelievable ways possible, driven to death by their own doings and a pinch of cataclysmic fate that overhangs the Buendia household, you begin to see through Ursula’s eyes when she keeps lamenting that history is repeating itself in a cycle. “What’s in a name?” asked Juliet in the Shakespearean epic Romeo and Juliet. Well, in the Buendia family, these two names are not only catastrophic but even prophetic. Not only are genes passed down, but so are traits attached to particular names. So you see the Aurelianos shut up in Melquiades’ room deciphering ancient parchments, the Arcadios boisterous and extravagant, the Remedioss with a fate that catches up to them in childhood itself, the Amarantas with the urge for incest/paedophilia and Ursulas with grit. One cycle strikes your mind very soon — anyone with these two male names is doomed to destruction and death; everyone else is just a by-product of what these two names have done.
It won’t take you long to realise that everyone is obsessed about something. Jose Arcadio Buendia is obsessed about science and progress, Colonel Aureliano Buendia is obsessed and later disillusioned with war, Jose Arcadio about physical power, Jose Arcadio Segundo about engaging a worker’s strike, Aureliano Segundo about wealth, Amaranta about revenge, Fernanda about discipline and order, Jose Arcadio about Amaranta’s love, Renata Remedios about freedom, etc. Their obsession consumes them unto death. True to their name, it is the Arcadio line that procreates while most of the Aurelianos stay bachelors or without an heir. The Aurelianos are the literal ‘solitary’ figures.
The characters aren’t just mentally isolated but the family itself is isolated in Macondo and from the rest of the world. It’s as if the Buendia family is the focus and the world the periphery you see through their lens. Maconda was founded by the Buendias and wiped out by and with the Buendias, with them being the cause of their own eventual fate. Despite all the happenings, the white house that Ursula manages to create becomes home to generation after generation of Buendias, who have no desire to leave their safety zones and whenever they do, they end up returning to Macondo.
There are a few significant incidents that when I read, I could resonate with real-life incidents elsewhere, though Marquez intended it to be a political history of Colombia. The first is the 20-year war that Colonel Aureliano Buendia fought. Several pages are devoted to the generation of Buendias who fought for the Liberal faction of the war and lost and later signed an armistice with the Conservatives. What were they actually fighting for? Was it to free Macondo and Colombia from the conservative clerical regime as one character puts it : “We’re fighting this war against the priests so that a person can marry his own mother.”? While the initial ideals were in place, as the years progress, you see that no one knows for what they were fighting. Marquez mentions that by the end of it, the two factions look the same with the only distinction being the time they went to mass. From what I have read of the two World Wars, this was a similar reaction that people had — a lack of purpose and direction. As Ursula later mentions about her son — “The certainty that he was finally fighting for his own liberation and not for abstract ideal, slogans that politicians could twist left and right according to the circumstances, filled him with an ardent enthusiasm.” And this was long after he had quit the war and retired into a corner of the Buendia house.
“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he [Col. Aureliano Buendia] began to lose direction. He felt scattered about, multiplied, more solitary than ever.”
After years of fighting for a supposed cause, he realises he’s back to square one, a mental trauma that is reflected in his mundane chore of melting tiny golden fishes and re-creating them again and again for what sounds like an eternal loop, mimicking the family’s cyclical fate. “He needed so much concentration to link scales, fit minute rubies into their eyes laminate gills and put on fins that there was not the smallest empty moment left for him to fill with his disillusionment of the war.”
“He [Col Aureliano Buendia] had had to start 32 wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hag in the dungheap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost 40 years late.” Almost blind, Ursula realises that her son fought not for valour but just out of pride.
The war was a lost cause — just like every other war.
The other incident that caught my eye was the setting up of the Banana Company and everything else that follows. This, to me, looks like the tale of every form of colonialism that has ever existed and which later transformed into capitalism. Foreign establishment lands up on the shores on unknown territory befriends locals and figures out there’s treasure to be dug up and when they’ve sucked them dry and turned the land into worthless garbage, they scoot. The South Asian subcontinent, Africa and of course North America can relate similar tales to what Marquez shows in Latin America. The strike that Jose Arcadio Segundo leads would surely have evoked some memory of a strike you might have heard of or seen in recent times. The response of the Banana Company also sounds not too off the mark — that their demands were excessive. They demanded better sanitation in their living quarters, getting medical services, terrible working conditions, payment in the form of scrip that could only buy them things from their parent company and working on Sundays as well. What happens?
“It was there that the sleight-of-hand lawyers proved that the demands lacked all validity for the simple reason that the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis.”
Sounds like something you’d hear even in the 21st century right? (hint: Amazon and Uber’s policies regarding their employees/worker partners) Later on, they even established that ‘the workers did not exist’ in the first place.
What happens here, gives rise to another important aspect of history — that of rewriting, desecrating and wiping out history and also memory. At first, it’s a laughable tale when an insomnia plague hits the early generation of Macondo and is cured by the prophet-like Melquiades. Who’s ever heard of that! Though the insomnia incident never reappears in the fatal manner as it did at first, Marquez shows that the human mind is susceptible to being twisted out of reality very easily. If you the reader are in shock when you read, so are the residents of the village. In the midst of the ‘modern’ Macondo of the later generations you come across this quote:
“If was as if God had decided to put to test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay.”
The macabre distortion of reality is witnessed in the Banana strike massacre incident. After the establishment gunned down nearly 3000 people, the sole survivor, Jose Arcadio Segundo, returns from among the dead to a town that has no knowledge of this incident. Not only were the dead bodies disposed of but the incident was wiped out of history and memory simultaneously and instantly. Instead, people were made to believe an alternate version that the strike ended peacefully when the striking men decided to concede. Just like how they fooled the people into believing that the Banana company never existed.
This troubling incident of throwing 3000 dead bodies into the sea reminded me of the Jewish Holocaust. A reality that the Nazis tried to justify and deny. The only point that struck me as absurd here was how did they manage to convince so many people of an altered history and did not people question about the dead from their families? Or was it just a fancy of his mind where he imagined himself to be leading the strike and its brutal culmination?
Not only is history distorted but even disrespected by later generations. This is true even today. Only those who fought wars and who lived through the era would know the difficulties and later generations would take for granted what their forefathers sacrificed their lives for. It took India decades to free itself from the clutches of the British but today 70 years later, we take the same freedom for granted because we never knew what it was like to be under the British’s thumb.
The officer who later visits the Buendia family sees Col Aureliano’s gold fishes not with nostalgia or curiosity but as if he was watching an exhibition. To him, it is nothing but a ‘memento’ of a time gone by that he had just heard about. Macondo had progressed so far ahead that the fishes which once were ‘a mark of subversion’ are now just ‘relics’.
The madness of everything is too much to bear and Fernanda del Carpio, the wife of Aureliano Segundo ends up shutting the house and confining everyone forever. For all the exploration that Jose Arcadio Buendia had wanted to undertake, the family’s fate was to never have gone far from their founding place. Whether they liked it or not, chose it or not, their fate had been written that they were to be born and die in solitude — not just the Buendia family but even the village of Macondo.
