One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa

After reading about a hundred pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, I began to worry that this book was going to kick my butt. I just didn’t know what it meant or what it was about. I decided, however, to just sit back and enjoy it as an ingeniously well-told story. I was rewarded.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of the Buendía family beginning with the founding of the city of Macondo by José Arcadio Buendía. There ensues a seemingly endless progression of sons and grandsons named José Arcadio and Aureliano that I couldn’t help but lose track of. I wasn’t really alone. Ursula, the family matriarch, as she reached an impossibly old age came to the conclusion that “time was going in a circle,” and “ ‘The years nowadays don’t pass the way the old ones used to,’ she would say, feeling that everyday reality was slipping through her hands.”

The stories of the Buendía family are characterized not only by a confusion of time, but also by gigantic improbabilities and impossibilities, dramatic courage and cowardice, impractically placed love, obsession, and at least a pinch of insanity. As for their relationships with each other, they are probably best characterized by the description of the relationship between the last José Arcadio and the final Aureliano: “That drawing closer together of two solitary people of the same blood was far from friendship, but it did allow them both to bear up better under the unfathomable solitude that separated and united them at the same time.”

This set of interwoven stories eddying through time is full of unnatural phenomena, unusual characters destined to be kept apart from each other, even in the same room, and ghosts who prove that “dominant obsessions can prevail against death.” The narrative style is so brilliant, so ingenious with such perfectly timed and metered phrases and perfectly chosen words that the unnamed and unembodied story-teller gains itself infinite credibility. I could be in the midst of this book and read, “It rained for four years, eleven months and two days,” or “and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room,” and believe it all without question.

This is the first time I’ve read anything by Gabriel García Márquez, and, while I was expecting greatness (he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982), I was left with an urge to bow down and chant, “I’m not worthy.” This is brilliance and I am in awe and I cannot even begin to understand how someone could put something like this novel together. I am ready to answer what it is about, however, at least for myself.

Whatever real scholars of literature may see or understand in this book that I do not, my mission is more of the armchair variety. I want to know why someone who just likes to read for personal enrichment or even leisure and fun would want to take the time to read this. I think I did the right thing from the beginning. I enjoyed the stories, the family history that “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,” for their own sake. And a story, especially one as phenomenally well-told as One Hundred Years of Solitude, should, no, needs to be savored and cherished for the simple reason that it is a story, “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”


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