One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Gárcia Márquez

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

There are so many unique things about One Hundred Years of Solitude. The story spans several generations, and so characters cycle in and out of the story as the pages turn. The first page is a family tree of the Buendía family, so the reader knows the names of all the main characters to come, who will marry who, and who will be born out of wedlock. Characters are named after their forebears, so that the reader swims through a sea of Arcadios and Aurelianos.

In this novel, José Arcadio Buendía takes his wife and several neighbors on a journey over the mountains of Colombia to settle a new town, Macondo. This town springs up as a few huts scratched out of the jungle, and it grows around the Buendías over the years. As the family’s patriarch finds himself distracted by ethereal pursuits, the matriarch, Úrsula, finds herself burdened with providing for the family and maintaining the household. In another genre, this could be a very realistic, at times joyful, at times heartbreaking story of a typical Catholic family.

Instead, the Buendías exist in a story of magical realism. When gypsies come to town, José Arcadio becomes entranced by fantastic machines and ideas. One character has premonitions of the future. Another is followed everywhere he goes by yellow butterflies. In the first sentence, we discover that a “Colonel Aureliano Buendía,” is to face a firing squad. The family tree tells us this character will come in the novel’s second generation. When Aureliano is born, the reader wonders how this timid boy could ever become a Colonel.

I won’t describe much more about the magic happenings of Macondo, because you should discover them for yourself. But the magic takes a story that would be downright depressing without it, and turns it into a tapestry of rich emotion. Some of the Buendías are extraordinary, and some are dull. Some are loyal, and some are traitorous. Some are peaceful, and some are violent. Some are worldly, and some are insular. Over the course of their lives, the characters fall in love and out of love. They perform acts of kindness and betrayal. They both fight and protect each other and their neighbors. The two dozen family members in this novel each have their own story, complete with background, conflict, and climax; beginning, middle, and end.

I think One Hundred Years of Solitude can be about anything you want it to be about. It can have any lesson you’re looking for. That’s because in seven generations and one hundred years of any family and town, everything is bound to happen. Is there a lesson to the story of life on Earth? Is there one thing that life on Earth is “about?” Hardly. And so there’s no one thing One Hundred Years of Solitude is about.

Don’t take my vagueness to mean nothing happens this book. The events of Macondo clearly have their roots in real events of Colombia. There’s endless civil war, labor strife, political violence, and religious conflict. Liberals are pitted against Conservatives. Catholics against secularists. Management against labor. Foreigners against natives. García Márquez paints a picture of Colombia plagued by violence and rich with beauty at the same time. War is often something happening in a far off corner of the jungle, allowing characters to focus on upcoming weddings or home renovations. Then, all at once, war comes home in the form of cannons, knives, and firing squads.

García Márquez doesn’t take sides in the all-too-symbolic war between the Liberals and Conservatives. Both sides in this war commit atrocities, and neither seems interested in peaceful resolution. Instead, the novel shows how quickly little boys are transformed into monsters and how thin the veil hiding carnage from a peaceful town can be.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is also replete with disgusting characters and offenses. There is pedophilia, sexual violence, and adultery. It would be easy to recoil, to put the book down when confronted with these gross images. But García Márquez isn’t condoning the abhorrent. After all, in a book that is trying to fit the entire human experience in a few hundred pages, how could you erase the ugliest aspects of society? Just as there are bound to be saints in six generations of a family, there are bound to be demons.

If you do pick up this book, you’re likely to slog through the first few chapters, confused by all the Arcadios and Aurelianos, disgusted by the monsters, wondering what exactly the plot is. Take my word for it that the plot will emerge, and the ending will make the journey worth it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has iconic characters like Úrsula, whose strength will leave you floored despite some very human flaws. But what sets this book apart is not really the human characters but the settings, which almost emerge as characters themselves. The Buendía’s home and Macondo as a town may only be inanimate places, but they live and breathe with the Buendías. The magic that occurs in these places give life to walls and walkways, kitchen tables and town squares. In Macondo, magic seethes through the world, showing the reader that while human beings walk and talk, the world we live in is a force to be reckoned with, feared, and loved.

There’s also a new Netflix adaptation of the series, which I binge-watched while home sick with covid. The cinematography, set and costume design, and acting are all incredible. I highly recommend it (after you read the book first). For subscibers of this blog, my next entry will be on Love in the Time of Cholera, also by García Márquez. So stick around for another trip into old Colombia and some compare and contrast between these two novels.

One Hundred Years of Solitude’s first line, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” is confusing and intriguing. It will leave you, as the reader, in rapt anticipation of something as terrifying as a firing squad and as innocuous as a block of ice. Just know that in Macondo, everything and nothing happens. I can’t recommend this book enough.