COMMENTARY: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD (obviously). ⚠️
- Chapter 2. I read the dust jacket. I don’t know if that spoiled anything or not. But it said. “does nothing less than recapitulate the entire history of the human race”… and I recalled chapter 1, page 1 when it said “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point”. So I started looking for allegory again. Is Melquíades the devil who brings weird inventions and temptations to innocent Adam and Eve (José Arcadio Buendia & Úrsula Iguarán)? The Tree of Knowledge, right? And then they leave Riohacha to go found Macondo… Like Moses leading the exodus to the promised land.
- Pg. 31 - Is this… incest? Is José Arcadio the younger sleeping with his mom?… [next page later], nvm. Pilar Ternera.
- pg. 36 - wait is the flying carpet real???
- End of Chapter 2: Oh the sweet, delicious irony. Úrsula discovers the path to the future that José Arcadio couldn’t.
- Chapter 3. You know what I’m realizing? This story has a sense of wonder to it. There are fantastic events and wondrous incidents and we don’t do this kind of fiction anymore. It’s just not in our meta today. The beauty and the fantastic. It all ends up being this epic action film all the time.
- Pg. 60 Don Apolinar Moscote… government interfering a solid system…. like origins of virtue!
- End of Chapter 4: There are so many moments in the book where you have to do a double-take and go, “did that really happen?” And you think about it. Is the author saying it’s a metaphor? Is it an analogy? Is it symbolism? Is it a dream? And then you realize, yes, it actually happen, because this is magic-realism. And you have to get used to it. I haven’t read Magic Realism in a long while. I loved Jorge Borges and Salman Rushdie in university. You kinda just accept weird, super-convenient, fantastical events. But I supposed I didn’t expect that here because I had no idea what I was walking into.
- Pg.85 - oh the mysterious letter saying Pietro Crespi’s mom was sick. Ha. You forget how inconvenient communication is.
- Pg. 91 - wtf. Remedios just dies like that?
- Chapter 6 opening. Survives a firing squad. Ha. Chekhov’s gun doesn’t go off … and so matter of factly too.
- Chapter 6 close. Cute. Arcadio dies by firing squad. Not Aureliano
- Pg 142 wtf is wrong with Amaranta?? (Won’t marry colonel Marquez)
- Pg. 152 - sure is a lot of pseudo-incest here and who the hell is Vistacion again?
- Pg. 186 - after Aureliano Segundo discovers Melquiades’ laboratory… ‘What’s happening,’ she sighed, ‘is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don’t come here any more.’
- Pg 205 you know entire books have been written using just one of these Magic realistic premises, but Marquez just comes up with them, hundreds of them, and they come one after another. It’s like you can’t breath and take in the craziness he just presented and he’s throwing out another one already.
- End of ch. 11 -“the innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo.”
- Ch.12 - technology and globalization all in one rush? Remedios - so innocent and unaware of her beauty - levitating away… Jesus? 17 Aurelianos being killed… knights Templar? Disciples?
- Pg. 288 - I keep thinking of Arrested Development and how much that show kept playing with timelines. You watch one plot from one perspective and then you see the same events again in a subplot but in a completely different light with humorous effect.
- End of Ch14 - poor Amaranta. Poor Mauricio Babilonia. Poor Aureliano Segundo losing his daughter.
- End of ch17 - holy cow Benjamin button, six feet under series finale… everyone’s dying. Ursula, Rebeca, Aureliano Segundo, José Arcadio Segundo. Petra Cotes
- End of Ch18 - excess, remorse and blowback of twentieth century? 1920s? More dead. Jose Arcadio the non-priest and the 17th Aureliano of the Colonel.
- End of ch19 - hahaha. Pilar Ternera is still alive and instigating one last incestual relationship in the Buendia family.