One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez

Uno de los grandes libros, no solo de nuestro tiempo sino de cualquier tiempo
— Jorge Luis Borges¹

I must admit that whatever I can say here, has been likely said elsewhere already. One Hundred Years of Solitude is, without doubts, one of the most emblematic works not only by Gabriel García Márquez, but could be considered as the peak of magical realism, holding a preponderant place in both Latin American and universal literature. Given this, the reasons of its abundant studies, reviews, essays, articles and so on are obvious. However, I still offer my personal perspective to whoever may find it of interest.

The title One Hundred Years of Solitude always resonates deep within me, carrying the weight of something ancient and hidden. It evokes, as it were a sort of spell, certain familiar feeling of majestic, like a name that once thought of, demands to be repeated loud of its magnificence. The plot of the novel can be summarized as the story of the Buendía family, starting with José Arcadio Buendía and his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, in the fictional town of Macondo. Throughout seven generations we witness their experiences about love, death, and of course, solitude. It’s also a story of the recurrying or cyclical time in a sort of return of the identical lived through different characters, who share the same longings, personalities, destinies and even names.

Magical realism is present in the novel, blurring often the boundaries of the reality and fantasy, mixing the mundane and the extraordinary and as it were the normal and using the same tone to describe both events—talks to ghosts, flying carpets, endless rains—. Due to the no linear narrative with shifts of time and locations in a smooth way, coupled with the abundance of characters and repetition of names, this work challenges the readers and force them to pay close attention to the development of the story so that they can put the pieces together to reveal the connections between events and characters.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is so rich in suggestions, topics and themes that might be interpreted in countless ways according where the reader decides to look at. I will highlight a few topics I find particularly interesting and relevant to understand the novel. In this case, I would like to begin with Macondo. The isolated town founded by José Arcadio Buendía—The Buendía family patriarch. In this village most of the events of the novel take place and is a microcosm not only of García Márquez’s native Colombia, but of all of the Latin America. Being an allegory of the region, we can see Macondo reflecting the insurrections of warlords, revolutions, fights against colonialism, economic exploitation, political strifes and corruption. These elements constitute the less affable yet very recognizable face of Latin America over the last two centuries until present day and sadly, they stand as a testament of the power struggles and corruption that have permeated the region’s vital core.

Macondo is also the stage where takes place the endless struggle of the old generations against the new ones, where tradition clashes with progress and, in last instance, it’s the main witness of the rise and fall of the Buendía family, since they both seem to be tied to the same fate—experiencing progress and decay until eventually reaching oblivion.

How awful," he said, “the way time passes!

Another topic strongly present in the novel is a cyclical nature of the history. The Buendía family find themselves entangled into a circle of repetitive behaviors, identical personalities and atavic desires. Even their names seem to carry an inescapable fate into themselves that the characters cannot break—as in the case of the apparently switched twins José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. Someway, the time doesn’t pass linearly for the Buendía family, but revolves around itself until repeating, conveying the inability to break free, and as in Greek tragedies, a feeling of helplessness in the face of the inevitable.

Although the Buendía family spans seven generations, we can make a distinction of two main archetypes of characters that recur across the lineage or are pass down generations. On one hand, there are the Aurelianos who are withdrawn and posses a lucid mind and curiosity for the world, being thoughtful and calm. On the other hand, there are the José Arcadios, full of impetus, impulsive and passionate and marked by a “tragic sign”. Both of them endure the solitude and experience passions in different ways. While the first sinks into himself and surrender to oblivion, he is able to give in to voluptuousness without believing in love. The last one lives the solitude from voluptuousness with an overflowing of passion that knocks down everything around him. His hedonist life contrast with the introspective of his brother and his womanizing, adventurous excess seem alienate him choosing most of time the temporal pleasure over meaningful relationships.

Because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones

If Colonel Aureliano Buendía is undoubtedly, the clearest example of loneliness in the novel with his life marked by personal disillusionment that leads him to the existential isolation defining his adulthood, we must not overlook the tragic figure of her sister, Amaranta. The solitude of Amaranta is self inflicted by rejecting love for what seems to be a fear or an incapacity to face her own feelings and emotions. This leaves her consumed by bitterness, unfulfilled desires and incapable not only to give love but to receive. Her inner conflicts reveals an intense emotional vulnerability, causing her to oscillate between kindness and cruelty, standing as the other side of Jose Arcadio, who chases his passions with diligence whereas Amaranta’s passion and self denial, out herself away of others, provoking both an emotional and physical solitude.

The novel is not only characterized by its nostalgic and sometimes tragic tone, but also incorporates humorous and absurd elements that enrich the narrative and offer moments of relief within the density of the work. Thus we see priests levitating, animals reproducing as if there were no tomorrow, the almost reverential treatment of the discovery of ice by the inhabitants of Macondo, the effects of the insomnia plague and the celestial ascension to heaven of one of the characters. Still, although funny, some of these situations make us reflect on deeper issues such as man’s fight against oblivion during the insomnia plague, or Aureliano’s obsession with making and unmaking little gold fishes while dreaming of dying of exhaustion in oblivion.

We can also see the prophetic character in the novel, personified in the gypsy Melquíades, illustrating the idea that in a certain sense, memory has no way back, not only for the Buendía but for everyone, that everything in the past is irretrievable and that everything could only be an ephemeral truth, since everything in the past annihilates itself, consuming itself within itself, but without ever ending. At the, through one of the last Aurelianos, the novel reveals the incapacity to decipher the signs that we have before us because of the inability to learn from the past. This finally leads to the anagnorisis of the last of the Aurelianos and his resignation to the events that had been prophesied.

All in all, solitude is the defining trait of the Buendía family members, and it can be interpreted as the inherent isolation of human existence or the inability to fulfill true connections. Ultimately, it is the description of the existential gap that despite our deepest effort of intimacy cannot be bridged, reminds us of the impossibility to reconcile the human individuality with a common union no matter how deeply we connect with others: we are islands, and nothing can truly touch us.