If you want to keep your book group talking all night, this is the book to pick! The reason: Garcia Marquez’s classic is working on so many levels, you can exhaust one topic only to realize that you have dozens more to go. 100 Years of Solitude can be explored as a historical novel (with some particularly scathing things to say about civil war and colonialism), as a work of mythology, as an exploration of gender, as an exploration of culture/religion, as a study of human psychology, as an exploration of the human condition, as an examination of free will vs. predestination, or even as a work of lyrical poetry. The book somehow manages to incorporate not just a few themes but almost ALL of them - love, solitude, family, identity, perseverance, war, justice, the corrupting influence of power, survival, sacrifice, hubris/pride, grief, revenge, death – all rendered in a vivid, dreamlike prose style that serves to heighten the emotion of every passage, somehow rendering beauty even more beautiful, wonder even more wonderful, and tragedy even more tragic. (Seriously, prepare to laugh, to cry, and to experience all the emotions in between.)
It’s important to remember that this novel is over 50yrs old. Many works of magical realism have come since, but this must have felt like a bomb dropped on the literary establishment at the time that it was released. People smarter than me have talked about why Garcia Marquez incorporates so many elements of hyperbole, superstition and magic. He himself has said that when he was a child, the stories his parents told him were always full of magic, so it was a natural act to incorporate magic in his own tale. Whatever the intent, the magical elements work here to add mythological resonance to many of the anecdotes, elevating them from narrative sketches to mythical tales (most of them with useful morals if you look for them). In this way, for instance, the story of Remedios the Beauty’s ascension into heaven becomes a myth about the perils of achieving perfection; the tale of the insomnia plague becomes a myth about perils of loneliness; and the tale of four devastating years of non-stop rain proceeding the brutal murder of 3000 innocent plantation workers become a myth about the corrupting/rotting influence of violence and greed.
One of Garcia Marquez’s major themes is that, so long as humans are too foolish to learn from our mistakes, we will just keep continuing to make them. (Which explains how “prophets” like Melquiades can exist – in order to appear as if they are telling the future, all they have to do is tell the past.) I bring this up because one thing your book group might explore is the parallels between incidents that are portrayed in this 50yr old book vs. incidents occurring in our world today, including culture wars between liberals and conservatives, the corruption of political leaders, plagues, sexual trafficking, and the militarization of scientific discoveries. Which raises the question: to what extent is 100 Years of Solitude a Melquiades-like fortelling of our own story? (How meta is that?!)
Just a few tips if you haven’t read this yet. The first being, give yourself time! This is NOT a book to be rushed through. Garcia Marquez plays tricks with time, with perspective, and even with reality - sometimes all three at once – often within a single paragraph or anecdote. Read all the words, and give your imagination time to not just comprehend but appreciate the effect of his masterful storytelling. Second, it may help to know a little about Columbian history, especially the early history of the country through the 1000 Days War ... so keep your phone standing by to look up the historical references. Third, give yourself permission to lose track of the names. The Buendias clan has a habit of recycling names (I think there were at least 3 Jose Arcadios? And over 20 Aurelianos?) but this artifice supports the overarching theme that humans tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, so in the end it doesn’t matter what fate befalls each, because the fates are collective and cumulative rather than individual. Fourth – especially if you’re female – try to allow yourself to loath the bits about female exploitation without letting your loathing color your whole experience. Looking beyond specific incidents of indignity, the women in this novel actually tend to be the stronger and more fully realized characters than the men. At the outset of the novel, for instance, Ursula may seem like a stereotypical “nagging housewife” from any old tale, but by the end of the novel she’s revealed to be the force that consolidates and perpetuates the Buendias clan. And I dare you not to cheer for Pilar Ternera, the local whore who, with all her immorality, proves herself again and again to possess more wisdom than any other character.
I’d envy those of you reading this for the first time, but it turns out I don’t have to, because this is the type of novel that one can re-read over and over again without ever running out of new understandings and discoveries. An extraordinary work of fiction, well-deserving of its spot on every list of “100 Top Works of Fiction.”
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