Macondo Musings, In Which Our Hero Tries to Make His Thoughts Coherent

In many ways, Gabriel Garcia Marquez rewrote the Bible. Harold Bloom called One Hundred Years of Solitude "The Bible of Macondo," which is the city in which the book takes place.

It's got a lot in common with The Good Book. It opens on Macondo's creation, where chaos rules and not everything even has a name yet. The book ends in a whirlwind of apocalypse in which everything falls into pieces. Between these bookend events are characters who live for hundreds of years, family histories, and a lot of stuff that doesn't make much narrative sense. Yep, sounds like the Bible to me. Too broad and ambitious to simply call it a story.

This is one of the things that is so difficult about OHYOS: the book covers so much time and five generations of a family, so I never felt really connected to any of them. They were certainly fascinating, however, especially considering how they changed over time. Take, for instance, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who started the book as an artistic little boy who crafted little fishes out of gold. In the middle, he takes charge of a rebel force fighting against the conservative government. In the end, after living a life as a ruthless warrior, he dies sad and alone of old age. This is life as written by Marquez: it's filled with wonders and changes, but it ends for everyone in the same way.

Life in the Buendia family is cyclical; events repeat themselves. The couple who begin the book starting a family fear the repercussions of incest, and incest pops up generation after generation. At first glance, this seems like a strange motif to have resurface over and over again in the book, but it makes sense after reflection. Incest further establishes the solitude of the family, keeping them from intermingling with others. More than anything, this is the major theme of the book, as the title suggests. The Buendia family is isolated from the rest of the town - they are constantly marrying within the family and the entire family lives in one big house. The town of Macondo, too, is isolated from the rest of the world. A rough and primitive place, it falls into conflict when an authoritarian government takes over, and life is further disrupted when a train rolls into town bringing along with it modern technology.

It's hard to write about this book in an organized way because the book is simply too big. I don't mean that it's big physically. I've read longer books. It's big thematically. There are dozens of themes I could write about here. For instance, fatalism is apparently something Marquez thought an awful lot about. Characters are often introduced by saying "He would think of this moment when he stood before a firing squad later in life." It's laid out for the reader already how life will end for this character. As the book concludes, prophecies become important as characters begin to see that their future has already been predicted.

See? There I go. I can't casually write about everything this book makes me contemplate. It would take way too long. To sum up my thoughts on OHYOS in an organized and detailed way, I'm afraid I'd have to write a 20 page essay, and I just did not enjoy it enough to spend my free time doing that. It's not that I didn't like the book; if a teacher made me write a paper about it, I'd be excited to do so. However, I have other things to do right now that are more important than writing recreational literary analysis**. I would love to talk about it, though. I think a novel this meandering would be more appropriate for conversation than composition anyway. Who's read it? Let's chat!

**More important things include reading Moby Dick. I'm through about forty pages and completely sucked in. It opens with Ishmael telling us that he sometimes feels the need to abandon society and take to the sea, the "watery part of the world." Did Melville travel to the future and read my previous post?