July 7, 2015
This is the second book by Márquez that I've read. It is very surreal, and I found myself wishing that I were an artist as I read it, because I would want to paint a series of beautiful and strange scenes from this book. When the people of Macondo, in the end, questioned the truth of these events and even the existence of the once-prominent Buendía clan, I got that. Their story, as predicted by an old gypsy 100 years in advance, is pretty unbelievable.
The Buendías were part of the group that founded Macondo, a cloud cuckoo land of a remote village in Colombia. The story follows them through a century, seven generations total. Incest was already part of their family history, and Úrsula's prediction that more inbreeding would result in a child with a tail came true in the end. Though not all family members engaged in incest, there was quite a bit of sexual immorality: infidelity, statutory, the Colonel fathering seventeen sons with all different mothers. The offspring from these encounters, or from "legitimate" marriages, were all killed in some miserable or horrific way.
Since the book spans a hundred years, no one at the beginning is still living at the end. Yet the family names are recycled again and again: all of the males are some combination of Aureliano, Arcadio, and José, and there are like three Remedioses. Even with the aid of the family tree at the beginning of the book, I had a hard time keeping track of characters and their relationships to one another. Perhaps Márquez did this on purpose, to reinforce the idea of history repeating itself. But the fate of the Buendía family is like a wheel that finally comes to a stop at the end.
The narrative repeated refers to the solitude of each Buendía. They always stick together, or those who leave eventually come back, and yet they are alone. Multiple generations of men, in their turn, stay isolated in the silversmithing room built by the family patriarch. Rebeca stays alone in her falling apart house after the death of her husband, her adopted brother. Meme never speaks again after being forced into a convent. Although the twins are born and die at the same time as each other, they are not immune to the solitude. Is solitude, in this case, synonymous with loneliness? For all of them (besides the last Aureliano in his early years), the solitude is self-imposed.
This complex book has likely been the subject of much dissection and many writings. I should probably look into some interpretations, because I'm not totally sure what message I was supposed to get from the story of this doomed family. I guess I've always believed that everyone is alone in this world, to some extent. We live and die alone, and I don't know if that's tragedy, just reality. This is definitely a book that I will come back to and read again in the future. I'm glad that I own a hard copy of it; I wish I'd given in to the temptation to mark or highlight certain lines and passages. This book is beautifully written and dense, and I'm glad that I took on this particular challenge.
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