domine 's review for:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

5.0

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“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

That sentence is what pulled me in. I was caught in a state of confusion, trying to grasp what it truly meant, trying to locate where I was standing in the story, and what point in time this narrative had actually begun. I found myself wondering what had happened many years before that moment, and what on earth ice had to do with any of it. I couldn’t quite pin down where I was, but despite the torrent of questions, I kept reading and reading and reading until I'm drawn forward by the mystery, surrendering myself to the current of the story with great uncertainty. And it's slowly began to make sense to me. I came to believe that “ice” isn't just a single object or moment, but a symbol of many wonders like magic itself. That first line felt like it was teaching me how to read One Hundred Years of Solitude: to blur the boundaries of time, to dissolve the line between fiction and reality. And that, I suppose, is what magical realism is all about. I used to think time was one of the most essential aspects in storytelling, it's something that gives it life and structure. But Gabriel García Márquez proved otherwise. This book was like a slap in the face, telling me that time doesn’t need to be fixed or linear for a story to come alive. In fact, this book feels like it’s everywhere and nowhere all at once. I realized I didn’t need solid ground to place myself, because life in this novel keeps flowing, passing, evolving. I was never in the “present” because the story often begins at the end, or in the middle, just like that unforgettable first line. In other words, this book places you in a space of uncertainty, as if you’ve just been born into a world you don’t yet understand but your fate is already written. And as time passes, you slowly begin to uncover what destiny holds for the Buendía family.

Each chapter begins with either "later” or “before” but never “now”. It creates this endless cycle of chasing the future or falling into the past, until it all forms a cyclical wheel of one family’s history. We may not always understand what’s going on in the moment, but at least we can distinguish between past and present. Yet entering Márquez’s world through that first sentence is to have that sense of familiarity taken away from us. It's like entering into a world with our footing gone, confused, and uncertain but we’re more willing (or forced to) to accept the surreal. We can’t resist the unreality because we don’t even know what reality is anymore. After a few pages in Márquez wrote a hint of how this world works when he writes: “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them one had to point.” It’s as if we, too, have just been born and this book wants you to see the world through the eyes of a child that is full of wonder and discovery, rather than feeling like you’re reading in a drunken stupor. Here you become aware of the repeating cycles of life how each generation gets back into the last, and how every character bears their own kind of solitude. As one of my friends (shout-out to Santino) said, each character have their own kind of solitude: for Aureliano, it’s greed and pride; for José Arcadio, it’s lust and physical desire. I’d add a few more to the list: José Arcadio Buendía is consumed by obsessive curiosity, Amaranta lives in fear and emotional repression, and Úrsula endures hers in the form of responsibility and strength. You begin to see how history repeats itself, how the lives of the Buendía family spin like a wheel that always starting and ending in the same place. It's as Pilar Ternera said later:

"The history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle."

I agree that this book is not an easy read, it demands a certain level of mental effort to keep track of the characters, especially since so many of them are named after their fathers, mothers, or ancestors. But as you read on, you start to recognize which Buendía, which Aureliano, which Amaranta, which Remedios, or which José Arcadio is being referred to. The repetition of names across generations feels intentional like it’s another way Márquez shows us that the family’s history moves in circles. You will begin to notice how each descendant named after Aureliano or José Arcadio carries the same traits and destinies with those who came before them. Though the core of the story is about generations of a family, it actually far beyond that. At times it’s about science and new inventions, other times it’s a romance or a tale of love and betrayal. Sometimes it's political, and sometimes it's religious. It’s through these aspects that the story becomes increasingly alive while scratching out the very idea of time as something linear or even important.

What pulled me in even more was how each chapter often begins with a tragedy, an incident, or a catastrophe or something I had to accept before I even understood it. And then slowly and with it's unhurried pace that it would begin to unfold. That's what makes this book felt alive to me so much so that at times I found myself wondering what was happening to the other characters while one thread of the story was being told. I honestly wished this book would never end. And yet, when the last Aureliano Buendía finally deciphers Melquíades’s parchments, and we read: “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants,” I felt the line of the Buendía family had finally reached its conclusion. Or maybe not? Maybe I’m wrong, and Aureliano’s choice to remain in solitude means the line could continue. No one really knows. But what I do know is that I didn’t want this book to end and it's not because I was emotionally attached to the characters, but because I had grown so accustomed with the world they lived in. I didn’t want the spell to break. And I’m not even sure I’ll feel the same magic if I read it for a second time, because some stories are only that magical the first time.