2017 Reading Challenge - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Welcome to the jungle...

Book 1 (January, Magic Realism)

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (translated by Gregory Rabasso and read by John Lee.)

Reason for Reading: South American literature and magic realism are strongly intertwined, at least as far as the canon of translated works exported to the English speaking world goes, and neither is something that I know much about. One Hundred Years of Solitude has a strong reputation both in Spanish and in translation, so that seemed a fair place to start from.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendias, a family of variously antisocial loners whose patriarch is one of the founders of the village of Macondo, along with his wife and first cousin Ursula. His name is Jose Arcadio Buendia, and his children are Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. Most of their descendants are also called Jose Arcadio or Aureliano (Aureliano in fact has seventeen children all bearing his name) with the only blips being Arcadio and Aureliano Jose, so it's a book that demands close attention. The daughters of the family have more varied names, but are fewer in number, as befits a line wallowing in machismo. The Buendia men are either towering geniuses or physical titans, blessed with an extraordinary blend of total commitment and capacity for vacillation. The women are determined and focused, but prey to violent passions.

Aureliano, who later becomes a revolutionary Colonel fighting thirty-two doomed wars against the forces of conservatism, has some gift of prophecy, and the family inherits from an ancient Gypsy named Melquiades a set of parchments which contain, deeply coded, the entire history of the line and of Macondo from Jose Arcadio Buendia's dream of a town of glass to the destruction of the doomed settlement in a great wind storm. The history of the family and their town is cyclical, not just in the names of the boys, but in repeating patterns of behaviour, the constant return of the more introspective sons to the study of Melquiades parchments, and a tendency for members of the family to fall in love with their own aunts (and an accompanying fear of one day producing a child with the tail of a pig,) to embark on doomed causes, and to remain forever solitary however many people surround them.

It's a somewhat bleak story, using elements of the fabulous as part of its commentary on the repeating nature of history and the political stagnation of a world where the conservative regime is eternal in its corruption because its liberal opponents either compromise too much or become monstrous warmongers; where hard work is always defeated by time and dissipation; and where the best that true virtue can hope for is to escape the miserable confines of reality after leaving a trail of destructive insanity in its wake. It is also, however, a deeply beautiful book, full of black humour and splendid prose. The translation is the only one ever published. It first appeared three years after the original, because Marquez insisted on waiting for the translator Gregory Rabasso to be available, and the author declared the prose to be superior to the original(1).

All in all, while I have a limited taste for doomed family sagas I think if I as going to read one then this is a good one to go for. I am definitely minded to look into the author's other work once the challenge is over, and perhaps see what else Latin America has to offer.

(1) New York Times, 2004