Book Review (Rucksack): One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1967

The Raccoon: One Hundred Years of Solitude aims to recount the entire course of human history and the harmful patterns of society.  On the surface, the novel traces six generations of the headstrong Buendía family, who live in the fictional town of Macondo.

UNMASKED: Márquez clearly poured his soul into writing One Hundred Years of Solitude; the novel echoes traumatic experiences from the author’s life and from Latin American history.  The raw mix of satire, inevitability, and nostalgia embedded in the text has elevated the book to mythical status.  Ultimately, the book lives up to its promise of being the next segment of the Bible.

Of course, like the Bible, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a cumbersome, difficult read.  Márquez displays a talent for magical realism, combining various mythologies with a patchwork of historical events and locations to prevent the reader from categorizing the story as fantastical or based on truth.  Consequently, the only way to comprehend the novel is to continuously remind oneself to let go; asking questions or expecting clear climaxes and transitions are as fruitless as keeping track of the lineage in the First Testament.  One Hundred Years of Solitude needs to throw the reader off to communicate its deeper story.  As stated in the even more convoluted, cult-favorite book, House of Leaves, “what's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the same.”

That deeper story tells of a people ravaged by both corrupt foreign influence and their own destructive passions, who preach change yet constantly regress in their development.  With every character representing a different example of what not to do, Márquez ultimately wants to force the reader to confront the fact that the only way out of society’s (or personal) cycles is to acknowledge the pitfalls of our old behaviors and begin completely anew.

Strengths:

• The quality is not degraded by reading the book in English instead of Spanish; Márquez even admitted to enjoying the English translation more than the original version.  Both authors display an impressive command over language, evoking vivid images with almost every sculpted sentence.
• The narrator’s blunt, objective tone highlights the novel’s tragic events.  Mirroring the way imperialist characters are quick to ignore or erase any hint of their own wrongdoing, the narrator brushes past massacres the moment after they take root in the reader’s mind, rendering us solitary in our suffering.

Weaknesses:

• The repetitive names accompanied by repetitive personality traits and actions push just past the line, rendering the stylistic choice more of a confusing inconvenience than a thematic message.
• For a story with such a wide scope, a disproportionate amount of beautiful language is spent on sex scenes and José Arcadio’s genitals.
• The element of magical realism decays as the book goes on.  While fantastical ideas still drive powerful moments in the story, the feeling of wonder that the reader experiences in the first pages of the novel is never truly recovered.

Rating: 17/20 gold fishes

Ideal Setting: You have already read the story, are currently reading the story, and will forever read the story.  Naming an exact time and place is unnecessary, because it has already come.