I just finished reading one of the masterpieces by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and as you have guessed correctly, it is none other than “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. So this article is an honest and naïve attempt to summarize this novel. To be honest, I couldn’t stop myself from writing about it. So here we go.
This is a novel with no single main character in focus as you would find in other. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has ingeniously webbed the characters that the readers are susceptible to confusing one character to another, especially with the names that often repeat in the generations, viz. Jose Arcadio, Aureliano, Ursula, and Amaranta. There is an implicit reason behind this repetition which the reader may or may not be able to unearth at the end of the novel. Marquez must have known that this state of confusion will occur among his readers, and that’s why he included a family tree, in the beginning, to help the readers to differentiate between the Arcadios and Aurelianos, at least.
The novel is set up in a small town named “Macondo”, maybe in the Latin American region. The town seems to be founded by the Buendia family upon which the entire novel is based. The novel starts with Buendia’s journey of creating a utopian society, isolated from the rest of the world for several years since its founding, except for the occasional visits by the gypsies bringing to the town the technologies and inventions from other parts of the world.
One of the gypsies, most notably, Melquiades, has been pictured as the most important but easily overlooked character, both by the Buendia in the novel as well as by the readers because as it seems most of the transformations and generations of the Buendia family almost had some reference to Melquiades’ deserted workplace, which used to be ultimately the place for solitude to at least any one of the Buendia’s generations, from the first one Jose Arcadio Buendia to the supposedly last one, Aureliano.
It may differ on the readers’ individual perception, but it appears that, at the end of the novel, it was none other than Melquiades who was narrating the entire events throughout the hundred years that happened in the lives of Buendias. The final Aureliano realizes the encrypted message left behind by the Melquiades in the parchments to the first generation of Buendia. Upon the horrific view of his newly born child from his wife (who was actually his aunt) Amaranta Ursula, where the newborn was eaten by ants, it is shown at that prodigious instant Melquiades’ final keys were revealed to Aureliano and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.
And as you can find somewhere in the middle of the novel that the first Buendia goes insane and his family binds him to the chestnut tree where he dies. Considering all these instances, the author has mysteriously slipped in the prophecies and the mysterious manuscripts by Melquiades as the ultimate text of the novel. In fact, the hundred years of solitude were predicted for the Buendias by Melquiades. Melquiades turns out to be the gypsy from the Oriental world and his manuscripts were found to be in Sanskrit which the Buendias have been trying miserably to decode for generations to generations.
The fate of Macondo town closely resembles the Buendias’. From the utopian and isolated from the rest of the world, the village loses its magical charm and innocence, and most importantly, its solitude state as it comes to contact with other parts of the world. Civil wars begin. Death, which was never heard of takes over the town. Politics take over. And behind all these unpleasant events, Buendia’s offspring seems to be responsible.
Marquez has been generous in providing the readers with the details of the events in the lives of the Buendias from birth to death, love affairs to marriages, and fantastic of all, the wild love-making scenes which seem almost real. Sometimes it also appears that there is an incestuous relationship among the Buendias’ generations Ursula was always fearing that such a relationship will bear children with pig’s tails—the fear that lingers throughout the books—which ultimately happens with the final generation of Buendia which the novel ends.
Just as with the turbulent history of Buendia generations, the town faces a similar fate, and with the hurricane, the existence of Macondo and Buendias come to a tragic end, only to realize that the entire events were just being played out of the predetermined prophecies of a cycle from happiness and utopia to the tragic and sorrowful end.
In order to truly appreciate the horizon of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one must read this masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Let me quote you one of the lines from the final pages of the novel that shows the author’s ability to capture the readers’ mind with his attention to detail (you can find plenty of such throughout the novel):
“He put the child in the basket that his mother had prepared for him, covered the face of the corpse with a blanket, and wandered aimlessly through the town, searching for an entrance that went back to the past.”
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is truly a masterpiece.
As commented by The New York Times, “Should be required reading for the entire human race”.
Trust me… You wouldn’t regret a single moment you invested in reading this magical book by Marquez.
