OBOC - Colombia

I’ve heard about the comparisons between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Borges, but having previously failed at Borges for Argentina, I was in two minds about picking up “100 years of solitude” lest it met with the same fate at my hands. Still I wanted to give it a shot. At the outset I have to say, I am not familiar with the history of Colombia (other than what I read as part of this effort), neither am I a student of literature. So if you are looking for an insightful review that connects the history of Colombia (specifically Aracataca) to that of Macondo and draws out the similarities and differences between the 2 legendary writers, please keep looking. If you are just curious to know what I thought of the book, read on.

“100 years” traces the fortunes and misfortunes of 7 generations of the Buendia family in Macondo starting from the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula who founded the city. Macondo is a city of dreams or a city of mirrors/mirages depending on how you see it. Jose Arcadio finds it believing it to be a city of mirrors but it ends up being a city of mirages as people remain trapped in the city until its eventual destruction. Isn’t that a straightforward plot? Not quite.

One of the central characters in the story is the wandering gypsy Melquiades who brings the newest inventions to Macondo and serves as the only connection to the outside world for Macondo. Towards the end of his life Melquidaes to avoid solitary death comes back to the Buendia household spending his remaning years writing mysterious parchments. Every male of the Buendia household attempts to decipher the parchments written in a cyclical cipher and just like them , we the readers are trying to decipher the code which is hidden in the “100 years”.

What is real and what is myth, what is history and what is prophecy? Lines blur and although time moves in a linear direction events repeat themselves through the 7 generations showing the cyclical nature of time. Every male is named Arcadio or Aureliano in keeping with the repetition. What is common among the people of Macondo is their tendency to believe in the fantastic and forget the facts, and a resignation to fate. Is Garcia implying that the destruction of Macondo is due to the residents’ attitude and is that a commentary on rural Colombia at that time? I don’t know. Again I believe Garcia is playing a trick on us like Melquiades and I will leave it to students of literature and experts to answer these questions.
The 2 words you hear the most associated with this book are “Magical Realism” - women ascending into heaven along with their laundry, raining for 4 years without even a brief respite, yellow butterflies following people in love everywhere, magic carpets, a plague of insomnia as a result of modernization that is so pronounced that even things like milk and cows had to be labelled – how do you explain all this? Poetic justice, clever allegorical references – whatever it may be, it was captivating to read and then there were the historical references which were woven into the magical narrative – the wars between the Conservatives and the Liberals, the atrocities of the Banana Company (United Fruit?).


In a story that spans generations where the family home is always full with multi-generational relatives, what struck me is the solitude that the characters experience even when living with one’s own flesh and blood. There is strikingly complete lack of love between people except in a couple of relationships. And anyone who is unlucky to fall in love with a member of this highly dysfunctional family pays a very high price sometimes with their own lives. This selfish, egocentric streak in the family finally results in complete destruction of their ancestral home and their family line and the town they founded. Garcia ends the novel by saying that races condemned to 100 years of solitude will not get a second opportunity on earth.

The novel and particularly the ending left me disturbed. Is Garcia condemning the nation of Colombia to a complete solitude? What was he trying to say? So I did some research and chanced on his Noble lecture for this book, where he describes the utopia he is longing for. I leave you with his own words....

“On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”