One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Paperback – February 21, 2006

I first read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" not long after it was first published in English, almost 40 years ago. It was a wonderful, and magically, if you will, introduction to Latin American literature. Subsequently, I've read several other works by Marquez, notably, Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International) some 20 years later, but none have quite cast the spell of my first "love," this one, so I figured a re-read was in order. The "magic" of magic realism has lost none of its charm.The story involves six generations of one family, established by Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, who also helped found the town of Macondo, in the lowlands of Columbia, though the country is never specifically identified. The in-breeding (and also out-breeding) in this one family is simply astonishing. I can't remember if the original edition had a genealogical chart at the beginning, but this one does, and it provides an invaluable reference in keeping the philanderings, and the subsequent progeny, straight, particularly since numerous individuals over the generations have the same name. What is the "Scarlet Letter" that is prophesized for a family with such a high degree of consanguinity? That a child will be born with a pig's tail.Marquez dazzles the reader with the intensity of his writing; it's as though he had a 1600 page book in him, but is given a 400 page limit. It is the furious sketching of a street artist, making every line count in a portrait. The strengths, follies, and interactions of the men and women are depicted in memorable events. And there seems to be a realistic balance and development of his characters. Marquez is also the master of segue, from one event to the other, and from one generation to another, with his characters moving from swaddling clothes, on to adulthood, and then into their decrepitude.From my first reading, I had remembered Rebeca, with her "shameful" addiction to eating dirt. First time around, I chalked it up to Marquez's "magical realism," since no one really ate dirt. Several years later I learned that it is a wide-spread medical problem, often driven by a mineral deficiency that the person is trying to remediate. The author also describes the disease of insomnia which was spread to Macondo, with an accompanying plague of forgetfulness. Magical realism, or the forgetfulness of the "now" generation that has lost the stories of the past?Establishing the time period comes slowly. Marquez mentions Sir Frances Drake, but he is in the unspecified past. It is only when a family portrait is taken, as a daguerreotype photo, that one realizes it must be in the 1840's-50's, with six generations to go. There are a multitude of themes: since this IS Latin America, Marquez has the obligatory gringos and their banana plantations (alas, all too true); there is endless, senseless war, with the two sides eventually unable to state what they are fighting for, except, of course, the war itself; there are the women who drive men crazy with their beauty, and there is the spitefulness of women to each other (alas, again, the "sisterhood'); there is economic development, and a worker's revolt, and the use of other members of the same class, but in uniform, who repress it; there is the role of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and even a family member who would be Pope and there are unflinching portrayals of the aging process, alas, to the third power.On the re-read, I noticed a portion of the novel that was much further developed in Innocent Erendira: and Other Stories (Perennial Classics). Also nestled in the book was an important reference: "Taken among them were Jose Arcadio Segundo and Lorenzo Gavilan, a colonel in the Mexican revolution, exiled in Macondo, who said that he had been witness to the heroism of his comrade Artemio Cruz." Checking Marquez bio, he has been a long-time friend of Carlos Fuentes, slipped this reference in 100 years, which is an omen for me, since I was considering re-reading Fuentes marvelous The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel (FSG Classics) And in terms of omens, redux even, do future travel plans include meeting another character in the book, the Queen of Madagascar?I recently had dinner with a woman who had been Ambassador to one of the Latin American countries. Spanish is her native language, and she still reads some of the Latin American writers in Spanish to "keep her language skills up." As for "100 years," she had read it four times, each time in English. It's a record I am unlikely to repeat, but this novel, which honors the Nobel Prize with its name, could use a third read, if I am granted enough time. It ages well, sans decrepitude, and provided much more meaning the second time around. 6-stars.

In the world of this story, solitude can be shared as well as cherished. It can be something that offers consolation, but it can also be an insufferable burden.In the world of this story, part real and part fantasy, with the distinction between the two oscillating periodically with random amplitude, ice is a rare jewel, wars are imagined to be fought using magnifying glasses, and the immune system can be almost infinitely resistant to pathogens. Obstinacy and dogmatism become tools for survival and provoke warfare, and keep the imagination at abeyance. Fear is ranked less than curiosity but curiosity can trounce social coherence and shared purpose. Curiosity dominates, beginning at birth, with no concern at all with any wax of Icarus.In the world of this story, the proliferation and diversity of avian fauna can operate as a directional beacon as well as an acoustic source of madness. Inventions can be in the imagination and as is canonical, can interfere with family life with its predilection to supervise and make rigid its younger members. Fortune telling and other flights of fancy can coexist with scientific and technical innovation with wandering gypsies being the innovators. There is also a slice of post-modernistic nihilism where words have filed for a divorce from their referents.In the world of this story, loss of memory is a collective infection as is insomnia. There is regularity but also an out-of-equilibrium ethos viz a viz the dance, a consequence of the precision of the metronome and the pianola. Social graces and the rigidity of manners are here also, as well as prudence and other forms of linguistic tools of social manipulation. But fantasies, and the tools used to prove them out, can be destroyed with as much zeal as when they were invented.In the world of this story, the soil of the land can be tread, even consumed, without taking into account any deity and not even reaching out for its assistance. War is brought about by the usual divisions, the usual ideological spirits, coupled with both religious and anti-religious fever. Fakery and quackery, and charlatans diffuse into the territory with ersatz concepts and inert pills. The cruelty and brutality of leaders meshes well with their political dogmatism.In the world of this story, the inability to sleep is not because of worry or biting conscience, but rather because of a plague. Passion and sex are not violent but loud, enough to wake the dead, and accomplished in inopportune places. As is typical, those who fight these wars did not know why they were doing so. Genetic purity results in challenges to the status quo, and with characteristic lack of spine exercises violence against the wild beasts who possess it.In the world of this story, the exhilaration of power (however fictitious is the latter) is countered by other enraptured and exaggerated emotions, leaving power wallowing like a hog in the dung heap of temporary glory. Isolation causes power to decrease exponentially, leaving its victim disoriented and more solitary than ever. Hell then becomes an anti-Sartrian lack of other people.In the world of this story, family backgrounds, affiliations, names, and characteristics are the result of random perturbations and combinations collecting charge when rubbing together, with consequent repelling when collecting the same sign, and coming together if not. Volatility in outlooks occurs without the stultifying latency of inaction.In the world of this story, beauty, incredible beauty, unbelievable beauty makes its appearance and instills both typical and atypical reactions, mesmerizing both the weak and strong, but inducing solitude in its bearer. But this beauty is natural, to be distinguished from the ersatz beauty of the those in authority, wrapped as it is typically is in bangles and crepe paper.In the world of this story, towns and villages can be transformed by inventions as well as doubt, by decadent saboteurs who open their triangles to any willing and paying cylinder. Tolerance as well as xenophobia is clearly manifest with respect to the skin rash of foreign elements who diffuse across boundaries and ergodically mix with the inhabitants, transforming its architecture and forcing them to take on false manners and an excess of tact, prudence, and ethnic tolerance.In the world of this story, intuition can win over perception, and cognition can sometimes win over intuition, but ice can be made in a hot jungle. Gluttony is celebrated as hospitality. Stomachs can at times have unbounded volume. Frivolous thoughts are sometimes quickly suppressed.......but descriptions use sentences that run on as effectively and magnificently as the human generations that span this story; this incredible display of literary machinations.