One Hundred Years of Solitude Review

This week's novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

This is the story of the Buendia family over the course of six generations, from the time they found the town of Macondo until the town collapses along with the family.  The matriarch, Ursula, and her husband are cousins and Ursula is convinced that their children will be born with pig tails.  They aren't, but the family is cursed to tragedy, solitude, and repeated instances of incest, to the point where Ursula thinks they might as well have been born with pig tails.  Their family expands and is wiped out just as the town grows around them and then falls  into ruin.

First of all, some really upsetting things happen in this book, the most egregious of which were child molestation and a mass murder that's covered up by the foreign banana company.  However, the way that the story is written makes it less awful than it could have been.

The story is full of magical realism like a plague of insomnia that attacks the whole town, a rainstorm that lasts almost five years, and a character who is followed by butterflies.  It has the feel of an exaggerated family story, where you know it probably didn't really rain non-stop for five years, but you get the gist that it rained a whole lot for a long time.  So at one point, one of the brothers decides that he's going to marry a beautiful girl...who is nine-years-old.  That's horrifying.  But at the same time, I got the impression that this was another exaggeration: his wife was very young and family lore exaggerated the story to say she hadn't reached puberty.  So this is what I mean about it not feeling as awful while I was reading it as it sounds if I were to summarize it.

The impact is also lessened by the fact that the entire story (and it is not a short book) is told in summary (as opposed to in scenes) with an omnipotent narrator who jumps around to the different members of the family and who is not involved in the story and does not pass judgement.  While it has the voice of family legends about family members long gone, which is one of the book's great strengths, the voice also puts an emotional distance between the reader and the action, which is one of the book's greatest weaknesses.  The two come hand in hand.  I've talked before about how the flatness of fairy tales makes it hard for characterization to shine through, and that definitely happened here.  I didn't have a grasp on what any character would do or say in any particular situation, and I remember characters based on their greatest sins, which (again) is kind of how I think about my family members that I haven't met, so it makes sense.

This book is bonkers, and it was magical, and parts of it were really fun.

***

Next week:  The Black Butterfly, a YA ghost story by Shirley Reva Vernick.