ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

THE UNIVERSAL TRUTH...

For a book worm whose favourite author is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the essence of his works which are titled to be largely a huge cloud pregnant with Magic Realism is a truth that should be universally acknowledged. That is to say, that the magical elements which appear surreal is actually the reality of our present day world. One hundered years of solitude may not be a story odd 100 yrs but definitely has a complex network of around 100 characters... each to his own yet entangled. The thread that entangles them is the family blood, which fights for a common cause. The plot is extensive and clearly woven with deliberate commotions, repetitions and irony. The senior most character represents the root of culture and beliefs that the family is trying to hold by tying him to an old chestnut tree, when he looses his sanity. the second generation man seems to have a sixth sense when everything he says comes true, finally dying of insanity yet carving out a fine gold fish on a coin and leaving 17 sons having the same name only to get lost or abandoned later in the novel. The third generation hero becomes a tyrant finally dying of a gunshot. Lastly a small character Gabrial Garcia Marquez, a newspaper seller who is a witness to the generations and the only one to have survived after the town is completely wiped out.

marquez refines the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon, through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. Over six generations all the José Arcadios possess inquisitive and rational dispositions as well as enormous physical strength; the Aurelianos, meanwhile, tend towards insularity and quietude. This repetition of traits reproduces the history of the individual characters and ultimately a history of the town as a succession of the same mistakes ad infinitum due to some endogenous hubris in our nature.
The novel explores the issue of timelessness or eternity even within the framework of mortal existence. A major trope with which it accomplishes this task is the alchemist’s laboratory in the Buendía family home, which was first designed by Melquíades near the start of the story and remains essentially unchanged throughout its course as a place where the male Buendía characters can indulge their will to solitude, whether through attempts to deconstruct the world with reason as in the case of José Arcadio Buendía, or by the endless creation and destruction of golden fish like his son Colonel Aureliano Buendía, among a number of other means. A sense of inevitability prevails throughout the text, a feeling that regardless of what way one looks at time, its encompassing nature is the one truthful admission.

marques’s masterpiece is a peice of advice that is given to every human being to read.