One Hundred Years of Solitude-Gabriel Garcia Marquez


****/*****                                                                                                                                      Novel

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Jose Arcadio Buendia founds a village, Maconde, by a river somewhere on a Caribbean island. Maconde is far from any other human habitation. Jose Arcadio Buendia has an insatiable hunger for knowledge and curiosity for new discoveries. Group of gypsies, headed by the all-knowing and ever-inquisitive Melquiades, visit the village regularly and bring to the village, the news, the inventions, and the air of the larger world. Ursula, Jose’s wife, brings forth and nurtures the Buendia clan. Through the travails of Buendia family, spread over a century and a half, and five generations, Gabriel Garcia Marquez weaves a magical tale of the Caribbean nation and human condition. His tools are fantastical. People live for hundred and twenty years, birds sing magical songs on every rooftop, ghosts visit the living to earn solace for themselves, old men live for decades, tied to a tree trunk in the courtyard when they suffer madness of senile dementia, epidemic of insomnia ravages the village for many years when people do not sleep or wink the whole day and yet remain fresh and alert, village is inundated by a deluge of rain that lashes the land for more than five years. There is a lyrical charm in these hyperbolic metaphors. Never, even for a moment, do they insult reader’s sensibilities; rather this ingenious narrative style is infinitely fascinating and provides a novel experience.

Fortunes of Buendia family are inextricably and imperceptibly entwined with the fortunes of the nation. Marquez depicts political turmoil, anarchy, relativism, rebellion, nation in throes of capitalistic machinations, all intermingled with the vicissitudes borne by the Buendia clan. Each member of the family is unique in his or her pursuit of solitude. But this obsession for solitude is driven by different objectives. Love, hatred, insatiable lust for knowledge, jealously, empathy, are just a few of these human quests that Marquez highlights brilliantly in this chimerical tale.

I cannot comment on language, as the original is in Spanish. But the translation by Gregory Rabassa is stunning. Story flows unobtrusively, page after page, for more than four hundred pages. Prose is highly readable and strikes you with its simplicity, elegance and poetic fluidity. I can say without hesitation that this is one of the best fiction books I’ve read.

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