Book Review: 100 Years of Solitude

Magical realism by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Reviewed by Beverly Mantyh

Marquez’s Nobel prize winning novel weaves together themes of solitude, war, exploitation and predestination in the style of a fantastical folk story told by rambling gypsies around a fire.

The Buendia family saga begins with the marriage of cousins José Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguarán. Ursula fears that their incest might produce a child with a pig’s tail like that of a tragic relative who lived in isolation his entire life. Ursula refuses to consummate the marriage. Eventually, José’s cock-fighting nemesis Prudencio insults him on the topic, and José kills him, then goes home with his spear and challenges Ursula to give it up or die. They enthusiastically consummate their marriage while the sounds of the victim’s mourning family float through their bedroom window. All this is told in a detached voice, void of all moralizing. Marquez takes the first Buendia skeleton from the closet; next comes the ghost.

The courts find José Arcadio innocent of murder, but the sad and lonely face of the ghost of Prudencio haunts José and Ursula. They strike out into the unmapped rainforest to start anew, founding the village of Maconda.

José Arcadio and Ursula live long lives and have many descendants. They live through gypsy distractions, a plague of insomnia, government troubles, war, western exploitation of their natural resources and almost all the dysfunction known to families. The twists and turns of Marquez’s plot keep the reader’s interest even when the character of the moment is distasteful.

The over-riding theme circles back to the isolation of the original pig-tailed cousin and the ghostly loneliness of Prudencio. Are we trapped in a pre-determined fate? Are our destinies thrust upon us by our families or by bigger forces we can not hope to escape? A moralizing author could have a field day with the adventures and misadventures of the Buendia family. Marquez rejects easy answers and maintains his detached, nonjudgmental voice to the end. He leaves his readers in their solitude to reach their own conclusions.

Discussion Questions:

1. The Buendia family is plagued with self-involvement. They welcome illegitimate children, old gypsies and lost girls into their home. Thus, they seem open but somehow family members can’t get beyond their assigned roles. Brothers and sisters can experience the same situation in radically different ways. With the holidays approaching, how can I open up my perspective to see things from my sibling’s point of view?

2. Time flies, time crawls and time is suspended. The spinster aunts and their day in day out routines turn time into a slow moving metronome. After the banana plantation exploits, time flies so quickly that true history is forgotten. A lifetime is reduced to seconds before the guns of a firing squad. What influences your sense of time? What brings a sense of peace and orderliness to the passage of time?

3. Magical Realism refers to a style of writing that with a straight face interweaves the fantastic with ordinary life: the ghost of Prudencio; the assumption of Remedios the Beauty; Melquiades’ ghost. Marquez’s characters see nothing out of the ordinary in these events. Some critics think the “magical realism” oversimplifies Marquez’s point. Is Marquez proposing reality is bigger than our scientific theories? Or, do you think Marquez is simply bringing elements of folktales into his fiction?