Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude

 by Anjali Arackal

What is the longest time you’ve taken to read a single novel? A question with multitudes of answers, but mine is short: over the last six weeks, I read One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Gabriel García Marquez’s famous novel (Cien Años De Solicitud in the original Spanish) has long been heralded as a “latter-day Genesis”, and is the most translated Spanish-language work after Don Quixote. Sales are estimated at fifty million worldwide. 

In 1967, when One Hundred Years was published, the ideal scenario would have been selling a modest regional first edition of eight thousand copies, attracting a mainstream Spanish publisher, followed by moderate international attention. This was the model set by contemporary Latin works like Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. It decidedly eclipsed these expectations, becoming a literary classic and consistently praised as “the best expression of magical realism [where the real world is depicted with an undercurrent of fantasy]”.

Safe to say, my expectations were not low. I came out disappointed. Firstly, it was just so dense! The plot is inherently that of a family saga over one hundred years, through five generations of Buendías, in the rural village of Macondo. Cyclical and fantastical, the plot recalled images of an ouroboros in the tragic inevitability of the fates of the family.  The circular nature is shown in the tradition of repeating names (every new son is named Aureliano or José Arcadio, and daughters named Remedios or Ursula) and motifs such as the returning Gypsies or the concept of memory. However, this also made it a slightly dull read. The repeated names made it difficult to keep track of an ever-growing cast, and the daily family episodes made the pace somewhat slow. This was not helped by characters that I found unlikeable in certain parts. 

Nonetheless, there were some redeeming elements. The incorporation of magical events (for example, a plague of forgetting, or a woman so beautiful she ascends to heaven whilst folding laundry) made the plot unpredictable and intriguing. Furthermore, unrelated to my personal enjoyment, it captured an essence of the historical experience not only of Latin America, but the millions of people in other colonised regions. The imperialist capitalist invasion of the banana company, which exploited the land and the workers, has parallels to events all over the world. Nii Ayikwei Parkes, award-winning British novelist, said of the book: "(It) taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-Western writers like myself and other writers from Africa and Asia." He added that, "Apart from the fact that it's an amazing book, it taught Western readers tolerance for other perspectives." Undoubtedly, this is a vital part of the importance of this novel. 

Should you read this book? I’d certainly encourage you to give it a go! It is deeply traditionalist, the first line reminiscent of the famed “Once upon a time”, but compared to other literary classics, I somehow found it more readable. Although I will not be rereading it, I don’t regret persevering through this poetic and verbose novel.