Books Time – One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Gabriel Garcìa Márquez is an author I always wanted to read. It's the classic case of the writer whose writing style you love or hate, no grey shades. My best friends hates it, and even though she started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, she couldn't finish it. After having read the book, I kind of understand why she had to stop and couldn't turn a single page more. 

(PS: just so you know there are some book spoilers here, so if you don't want your reading to be ruined, don't read the last paragraph!).

One Hundred Years of Solitude is actually a book about loneliness, as the title says. It might appear that the focus of the story is the Buendia family, whose founder José Arcadio first has the idea of giving life to a new town, called Macondo (fictional town probably situated in Columbia), at the end of XIX century. In that town, 7 generations of Buendia are born, live and die, until the realisation of the prophecy once whispered by a gipsy man hosted by the family: “The first of the family is tight to a tree, the last one is eaten by ants”.

None of the Buendia members live a happy life. Each one of them is hunted by a desire, an unreachable goal, a forbidden feeling, which is eventually going to bring them to death. So the founder of the family José Arcadio wants to create the Philosopher Stone; his son, also called José Arcadio, wants to live free love, and escapes with the gipsies; his brother Arcadio becomes involved in the Country's revolutions, becomes a general and fights 32 wars, none of them with a proper goal, and non of them won. A girl adopted by the family, Rebeca, eats pieces of walls and earth when she feels lonely, and tries to hide her terrible secret from the other members.

Those are only a few examples of a very long, complex family history, that the author writes down in a magic, yet realistic way, enriched by sometimes cruel events, described in such a way that the reader stops for a second, shocked.

It is surely not easy reading and imagining Rebeca eating earth and cement wall pieces; it is not easy reading and imagining the workers standing in the square to discuss about their rights, being cruelly shot by soldiers and then thrown into a train to be drowned in the sea. Animals slandered, people killed, children abandoned; when I reached those parts I understood why my best friend couldn't bear reading a single more page.

On the other side, it is impossible to deny that Marquez story is beautifully written, and describes the feeling of loneliness proper of mankind during the century he writes about. Because despite their wealth, sympathy, courage or stubbornness, none of the Buendia lives happily. They all die, and die in loneliness, regretting past mistakes and not having done anything to avoid them.