Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

For the first 200 pages of this book, I prayed that it would go somewhere and such intoxicating, compelling images and characters would not simply be tossed in the dungheap of my memory for want of relevance. I worried that I was reliving the reading of Villanueva's Rain of Gold, an experience which I enjoyed at the time but of which I cannot recall a single detail. For the third quarter of the book, I was heartened by the foreshadowing of a profound and tidy truth that would only be revealed at the end of the book. For the last quarter, however, I abandoned myself completely in the indelible details of this masterpiece, and only then did I receive the message. Not only does the book not go anywhere, it does so purposefully and pointedly. The book is a wheel on which Marquez spins an elaborate shroud, and on which he then spends just as long unravelling it. It is this trait which, in my mind, defines the most masterful works of literature: Each scene is a microcosm of the book as a whole, and each character does to themselves what the author does to the universe which he creates.

Which is not to say that I am entirely on board with Marquez' message. From the title to the tiniest detail, he demands that the reader accept that the human experience is inescapably solitary. What is compelling is that each character is alone in his or her own way. The women especially are so clearly drawn, so simultaneously fantastic and human, that one is struck by the vast and inexhaustible variety of solitude that exists in the town of Macondo. Each of them, Fernanda, Remedios, Amaranta, Ursula, Pilar, and even the minor female characters are so crisply created that one is never in danger of confusing them. The same cannot be said for the male characters, which fact might be a literary device and might equally be a lapse in authorial attention. The copious and varied populace of the novel careen into each other like depraved bumper cars in a praody of human existence that invokes the perspective of Virginia Woolf, who seems to have shared Marquez' faith in the fundamental isolation of the human spirit. I simply do not concur. The human spirit is undoubtedly adrift in a social sea. But one can authentically, if briefly, touch and hold the spirit of another. The experience has more than once driven me to weep with an emotion that is neither sorrow nor bliss, but simply the neutral, flavorless emotion which serves as the canvas on which all other emotions are painted. But that's just my experience. Even though I cannot endorse Marquez' theme, I will never escape the image of Rebeca eating earth to escape her animal passion, of the locket with a strand of hair locked in a suit of armor at the bottom of a river, of Amaranta's black bandage, or of the myriad other burning images with which this novel almost carelessly overflows.