The tail of a pig (One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Member Name: Belgian999

Product:	One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Date:	11/12/03 (364 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A magical fairytale of a story, beautifully written

Disadvantages: You really do have to willingly suspend disbelief to accept some of the more unreal events...

?One Hundred Years of Solitude? marked the breakthrough for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it was the novel that made his name and launched him into the public consciousness. Since then, he has gone on to cement his reputation as a writer of international renown with such works as ?Love in the Time of Cholera`, and the excellent factual description of modern-day Columbia in ?News of a Kidnapping?.

Marquez denies that ?100 Years? has any great basis in his own life in the backwaters of Columbia, but I feel that there must surely be some parallels there, albeit ones obscured and warped into beautifully strange (and perhaps almost unrecognisable) shapes by the author?s inventive and magical prose style. At every turn, I felt that Marquez was putting some personal touch into the details of a character or an event, but the wonderfully turned phrases obscure their origins and take on a life of their own. He describes in intimate detail the lives and loves of the inhabitants of Macondo, a town in some unnamed South American republic that is apparently remote and cut off from civilisation, yet simultaneously plays a key role in the development of the nation to which it nominally belongs.

At first, it is but a tiny settlement in the middle of nowhere, but over the course of the eponymous one hundred years, it swells to become the boom town of the banana industry, experiences the coming of the railroad, and sees one of its most famous sons lead ceaseless rebellions against the corruption and ineptitude of central government. Yet despite all this, life in Macondo continues on its own path, driven by forces beyond the control of the inhabitants. Everything is exaggerated ? years of plenty are followed by years of hardship, it rains for four years and the pater familias remains tied to a tree in the yard for decades, taking no food but outwardly unharmed.

The story of the town is inextricably intertwined with the family history of the Buendia clan, with its
many liaisons and marriages, children, fantasies, curses, wishes, dreams and disasters. It seems to me that the names of all the characters are chosen deliberately so as to emphasis the sense of confusion and lack of clarity. The reader is overwhelmed by a host of names - Antonio, Ursula, Remedios, Jose, Arcadio, and Aureliano. The list is seemingly endless, and the apparent ability of each of these characters to put themselves beyond the reach of the laws of time and space that apply, travelling far and wide, assimilating knowledge from abroad, yet all the time drawn inevitably back to Macondo.

All of this is written in such languid and beautiful style that the most seemingly contrived coincidences do not appear out of place. This is magic realism, taken to its furthest extent ? even the shockingly unexpected ending is somehow appropriate, given all that has gone before. That said, at some points in ?100 Years? I found myself thinking that I had read it all before. It took me a while to come up with a reason for this, but I think I can put my finger on it now, even if the reason does seem grossly unfair to Marquez - and to Louis de Bernieres.

De Bernieres is also the author of works of magical fiction, set in an imaginary and wondrous town somewhere in an unnamed South American republic. I had read his trilogy of novels some while ago, and while I?m not suggesting that he plagiarised Marquez?s work, it is clear to me that this is where he got his inspiration. The key difference is that de Bernieres applies a very British sense of humour in his writing, and he is approaching it from a ?foreign? standpoint. Marquez, on the other hand, is writing very much from the point of view of an insider, which is why the idea that he has put personal experiences into ?100 Years` seems particularly relevant to me.

I mention that only in passing, and perhaps as a word of warning if you have not already read ?100 Years?. I found the unfair comparison with
later works by other authors to be unavoidable, as some similarities (remote town, inhabitants with supernatural gifts, mad or eccentric priest, apparently inexplicable illnesses and so on) just leaped from the page. However, seen independently of literature that it inspired, ?100 Years? really is a great, magical mystery tour into the South American subconscious, if there is such a thing. Beautifully written, it manages simultaneously to confirm and debunk some long-held myths about life in South America, and is a joy to read from the first page to the last.

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