READING A MASTERPIECE IN SOLITUDE
A breathless reading experience helped me sail through a hairy week.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
The unforgettable opening line above of the masterpiece I chose to read this week has been quoted so many times by so many millions in so many languages that it has entered the annals of literary cliches for bulletproof beginnings. Desperate mimics such as I must try to write our own versions, however, and thus I must begin my own narrative for the week.
Many hours later, approximately twenty-two hours after I’d begun reading the late Gabriel García Márquez’s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, I would remember, as I faced my dentist’s hammer and drill, that a little later on that dismal afternoon, I would need to go to the freezer in my kitchen to discover some ice for my swollen cheeks. Years later, I’ll no doubt be telling my grandchildren how, in the same week in April 2022, I was hammered not only by the artful fabulism of a master storyteller but also by the fabulous artistry of my board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon.
I was in thrall of all the technology at my dentist’s office this past Monday—at the blood being spun to isolate my plasma, at the four strikes by the hammer to gird something onto my bone, at the membrane being layered onto my gum, and at the new bone that was being coaxed to grow, with the kindness and cooperation from my very own tissue. No wonder that the people of Márquez’s fictional Macondo were awash in wonder as gypsies brought high technology from distant new lands into their Colombian village—in the form of ice blocks, magnets, magnifying glasses, telescopes, and, not to forget, dentures.
I survived my dental surgery—a bone augmentation—while ruminating over the magical happenings in Macondo. The nobel laureate and his translator, the late Gregory Rabassa, employ hypnosis throughout the 417-page epic. I wondered if an audio version of the book may even have served as an effective anesthetic.
I cannot adequately describe how I feel when I read a writer like Márquez. He made me forget about having to cook, eat and sleep. In this interview available on Kanopy, Márquez tells his interlocutor that a narrative must be aware of the rhythm of its reader’s breath; anything that hampers that, he says, deserves pruning. In fact, what happened to me as I read this work was quite the opposite of what Márquez wished for in his readers. I couldn’t breathe for fear of missing yet another lyrical passage. I read some passages many times over. One scintillating, uproarious sentence bubbles into three pages. It was just an extraordinary—magical, I think—weapon to give voice to the blather of a nagging wife. My copy of this book has “omg!” marked in pencil on page after page, such as the one below that describes what happens right after José Arcadio is shot.
“A trickle of blood came from under the door, crossing the living room, went into the street, continued in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.”
Marquez makes us believe that a trickle of blood has a mind of its own, of course, and it doesn’t take too long for us to learn that just about anything can happen in Macondo. Early in the 1800s, when the Buendias build their home, it’s an untouched village in which no one has ever known death. When intruders bring objects from an inaccessible world, however, they ruffle the peace and harmony of the place.
Aspiration, unfortunately, creates anxiety. To the life of the village headman and patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, it brings madness. To his wife, Úrsula, it promises distortion and chaos. The world outside may often intervene in positive ways by bringing hope and opportunity. Little by little, however, an invader alters the grain of a people by multiplying want and greed.
Soon enough, the members of the Buendia family get entangled in what’s happening in Macondo. It too has become a banana republic in which a giant American business is in cahoots with the corrupt top brass of the country for mutual private gain.
In Macondo, I saw the story of many developing nations around the world wrecked both by the imperialism of marauding nations and the capitalism of business enterprises. The acres of banana orchards could have been cotton or opium plantations. I saw in Macondo’s new railroad, India’s own 25,000 miles of railroads built by 1901 by the British Raj simply to ferry goods inland from British manufacturers and also to carry India’s agricultural resources to the ports of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta.
Macondo’s train station is a hub of activity when banana production is in full swing. Soon workers at the factory demand better working conditions. As civil wars and insurgencies bleed the nation, martial law is enforced. There are not just rotting bananas to contend with but also the amnesia of a massacre that everyone in the village must deny simply in order to live.
Inside the Buendia family, if sons don’t die in one horrific instant, they live on so long in solitude that they are forgotten by their family and by the larger world. While all the Buendia men with the Aureliano name are impassioned, clairvoyant men whose intensity wreaks havoc across the nation, the men who inherit the name Arcadio become flamboyant studs whose hedonistic, unethical lives cost them even as their “flatulence withered the flowers”.
This is the story about how one family’s star-crossed humans can slowly upend a nation. It’s a larger narrative also about how our stories are written long before we are born. People come and go, history repeats itself just as names do, too. We make the same mistakes as our ancestors and it seems, in the end, that each of us is inside a prison fortified by our own demons. Márquez’s magnum opus points to the grandest irony of the trajectory of the world. Intrusion is disruptive to the normal course of human lives, yet the progress of human civilization hinges on the clashes—and the resulting synergies—of people coming together for a purposeful existence.
Until I read this book, I’d always understood the word “solitude” as a positive term. The word alluded to the state or the situation of being alone and, presumably, at peace with oneself. Having read ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, I’m inclined to think of solitude as a pejorative term instead, one that describes a state or a situation of being so removed from one’s human instincts that there is the peril of devolving into a lone, putrefying mass of flesh.
In the end, every Buendia is wrapped in a shroud of solitude, an animal reduced to and defined by his basic bodily functions, unable to belong in society. The father of the lineage, Jose Arcadio Buendia, goes mad, spouts Latin to himself and to others and is so destructive that he must remain tied to a chestnut tree in the back of the house. Úrsula, the matriarch, lives for what may have been 145 years, shriveling into “a raisin in a nightgown”.
Once a proud and honorable soldier, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who has spearheaded 32 armed uprisings, reduces, metaphorically, to a two-dimensional effigy of himself. By the time he’s emerged from all the wars that he has lost, it’s unclear what he was even fighting for all along. Marquez sums it up in a brilliant scene in which Colonel Aureliano Buendia tells Colonel Gerineldo Márquez his raison d’etre. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come to realize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.”
Your analysis of this work is very evocative.. I have not read the masterpiece myself but have heard often of it. The analogies you draw to our current world is very thought provoking and draws the reader to want to know more of this human condition and how generations after generations we continue to face the same emotions and question the meaning of living
It isn’t often that we are halted in our everyday living with a phrase or an expression or a thought that causes us to reflect and introspect
Your description of
“ This is the story about how one family’s star-crossed humans can slowly upend a nation. It’s a larger narrative also about how our stories are written long before we are born. People come and go, history repeats itself just as names do, too. We make the same mistakes as our ancestors and it seems, in the end, that each of us is inside a prison fortified by our own demons”
… Is very poignant and worth internalizing
A masterful analysis of a masterpiece. I have to share the memory of a tiny incident that looms large in my cache of fond memories. I was walking through a park in Buenos Aires some years ago and who should I come upon, but Marquez, no less! He was being interviewed for something; he was seated on a stool in the middle of the park and the camera crew were bustling about adjusting his mike, etc. I gawked at him; he glowered back. I didn't care that I, a middle-aged woman of a certain vintage was acting like a foolish teenager, and just stood there and drank in the sight of him until the camera crew shooed me away!