Have you read? One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

To reduce this novel to a simple plot synopsis would be both an oversimplification and misleading, as its intrigue lies in each unique episode that makes up the novel, and every character’s individual storyline. But put briefly, passionate inventor Jose Arcadio Buendía and his wife Úrsula found a town they call Macondo, and in which six more generations of Buendías continue to live in. Early on a visiting gypsy named Melquíades writes mysterious, undecipherable parchments which are left abandoned by the Buendías but of which contains the fate of both their family line and the town of Macondo.

Above all, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a beautifully written novel. The third-person narrative displays a storytelling tone which reads kind of like an adult fairytale, flowing seamlessly from one episode to the next, the momentum never letting up as each event is regarded as significant as the other.

The narrative voice remains deadpan even at times of high drama and when describing fantastical events. Márquez says that he adopted this voice from his grandmother, who told him stories as a boy of magical and improbable events, but always in a similarly deadpan manner that offered no hint of surprise at the occurrence of the unusual.

Through the use of this narrative voice Marquez perfects the magical realist tone. Magical realism is the narrative style which includes descriptions of fantastical and supernatural occurrences, but taken in the narrative world to be unsurprising and mundane. Marquez has become the most famous user of this style, and influenced several other magical realists such as Salmon Rushdie, Angela Carter, Isabel Allende and Louis de Bernières.

The tone shifts frequently from delight and wonder to despair and tragedy, as each character experiences beauty in life, but almost always meets a tragic fate one way or another. It soon becomes apparent that time in the novel is circular, as history repeats itself over and over with seemingly nothing anyone can do prevent it. Each generation brings another group of eccentric, memorable characters; there’s Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a solitary, knowing young man who grows up to become a legendary soldier; Rebeca, a strange young girl who arrives in Macondo with her parents’ bones in a suitcase; Remedios the Beauty, whose remarkable physical attraction induces death in several male characters; Aureliano Segundo, much loved by his fellow residents for his lavish, indulgent parties, which are frequent occurrences in spite of his protesting wife.

Gabriel García Márquez truly is a master of prose, and One Hundred Years of Solitude is without doubt one of the great literary works of the 20th Century. But to realise the brilliance of One Hundred Years of Solitude one experience the smooth, rich, flowing prose for oneself.

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