Book Review #50: One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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I actually read this book an year back without understanding initially. I re-read this book last week and was completely blown away. Every time I read it, I get a new meaning altogether. That’s the magic it brings to the readers. I am still reeling under the magic or whatever people liked to call it. The sheer brilliance of the author is out of the world. I wonder how he prepared himself while writing this book. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a true magician, has written a great piece of art, which stands as an epitome of classics in literary fiction.

I start my review with this small poem dedicated to the author…

O, Great Magician! 
Show your magic, show your skills
People are waiting, waiting in a daze
Show them voodoo, muddle in a maze
Show your wonder, show your power

This book is a story of a family. A weird family I would say. One Hundred Years of Solitude focuses on the creation and development of this particular family. The headman of the family or we can say the starting person of this bizarre family is Jose Arcadio Buendia. This family is a peculiar, with vastly different set of people, some crack heads and some sane fellows and some normal persons, but all will feel more human and real. There is not one particular protagonist from this novel.

This novel covers an entire 7 generations with most of the names repeated for every new generation character. That sort of makes it more confusing. I did go back to re-read who is who and continue to read to be in aware of the character that I am reading. There is no witchcraft or wizard stuff in this novel, yet, there are magic moments every now and then which will make the reader go in awe. One such thing is, a girl who is on her deathbed, slowly rises upwards and goes into the sky and suddenly vanishes. The other family members who are watching this gape for some time and carry on with their regular chores. There are also few characters that will die and wanders in and out of the house as ghosts harming no one. There is also a girl character where she eats the earth and wall paint as her food, etc… these are just few glimpses from this book. There are lots to witness in this magical book as we skim through the pages.

The first family person from this novel is Jose Arcadio Buendia along with his wife Ursula Igurian leaves their hometown in search of a new place/village. Buendia finds the village Mocondo and establishes himself in this village. In this village their entire family flourishes. Buendia’s two sons Aureliano Buendia and Arcadio Buendia and a daughter Amaranta starts their childhood like any other children. The events that change their whole life and the impact it propagates to the next generations after generations is a pure magical creation of the author. One kid ends up as a Colonel while the other becomes just a criminal. The daughter takes up the lifelong celibacy.

This story goes on forever till the 7^th generation of Buendia’s family. While each generation will have their own set of ideologies and beliefs, but, none of the members in their family will find out any reason for their weirdness. They just accepted everything as it was and moved on with their life. The surprising stuff from the novel is, each and every character lives for almost 100 or more years. They witness their kids and grandchildren growth. And they also gets reminded of this strange solitude that everyone in their family had to go through, even though their house is full of people.

The hardest part of reading this novel is there are too many characters with the same name. Grandparents, parents and grandchildren were almost had similar names and there are lot of illegitimate children born to this family members. For ex: Jose Arcadio Buendia (Grandfather), Aureliano Buendia (Son), Aureliano Segundo (grandson or great-grandson) and 17 other Aureliano’s born to Aureliano Buendia as illegitimate children. As you can see, there are hell load of characters with the same name. Not only the sons, even their daughters, granddaughters had repeating names. For ex: Amaranta (daughter), Remedios (Daughter-in-law), Remanta (daughter-in-law), Remedios the beauty (granddaughter), Amaranta-Ursula (great-granddaughter) and so on. These names are enough to confuse the readers to go back now and again to see who we are reading now!!

Overall, I can see that this book has stood as one of the best books that were ever written in the history. I vouch every word of it. I didn’t post the review of the plot here, since, there is no such thing as plot in this novel. Every character has a new story to reveal and each and every incident marks as a new event. I recommend this book for everyone.

My Rating:

5/5

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