One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is a classic novel which I had never read. I expressed an interest in it and a Spanish student gave it to me as a leaving present. She loved it!

In a way I loved it; it seemed a very encyclopaedic way of looking at life: there are the children, the parents and the grandparents, there is the home town with all that goes on there - industry and businesses that spring up and then fade away, there is the geography of the town - is it on a river or the sea, is it on the road to somewhere? - and then there's the weather that must surely have an effect - what grows? what can be produced?

Then there are the characters: inquisitive or not, industrious or indolent, loving or selfish, lustful and vigorous or not? (in this book they generally are.) Garcia Marquez takes his characters from birth all the way to the grave and shows great understanding of how in the course of a lifetime people change, although the merciless way he tells of his characters' senility, which in some cases goes on for a long time, is hard to bear. There are many small miracles in the book - one day it rains flowers, another character's love attracts butterflies, another character's love affair causes his animals to be prodigiously fertile. At one time it rains without cease for 3 years and everything rots and the animals die - oh the ennui for the poor people of Macondo -, immediately afterwards it is dry for 11 years. There is also a war and a terrible atrocity which is all too believable. Then the truth is all covered up - again, all too believable.

My favourite character is Ursula because she has such energy and foresight, she saves money for future needs, she makes money by selling candy animals, she insists on honesty when the family finds a fortune, and she ensures that her illegitimate grandchildren are baptised. She is rigorous. The importance of the women in the family is huge. Without them there is no family as the men seem so prone to wandering off or hiding away with their own preoccupations.

Sometimes you ask yourself if it is only over a number of generations that an individual's life has meaning.  Maybe you can't understand the significance of your own life from your own perspective.  Some religions encourage their adherents to be present in the moment, to grasp it fully. For some people there is no aspiration for any other perspective beyond the next treat. Some of the characters in the novel are Catholics and see their lives from a long way off - from an idea of eternity.

David Mitchell is very good on the question of perspective - he says that we are too complex a species to live in the moment and not have some kind of narrative in mind, but, if we take the perspective of a hundred years from now, not much matters anyway. I think that because Garcia Marquez takes the perspective of a hundred years, you do end up feeling that the whole saga didn't add up to much in the end.

Here is David Mitchell explaining time perspective. It's brilliant.