100 Years of Solitude

This book took me 8 months to read. In the time I was reading this, I finished 4 other books: The Shining, by Stephen King; Grendel, by John Gardner; Catch-22, by Joseph Heller; and Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It's a good book, but I would have appreciated it if the author had taken it a little easier on the poor brain of the reader. After awhile, it becomes apparent that the whole book is simply a memory test.

It's always difficult to memorize names from a different culture, but even though the book takes place in Madagascar with it's peoples' origins in South America, Marquez went to pains to make figuring out who's who difficult for the exact opposite reason. He'll make sure you have no trouble remembering names, but that is exactly what will make identifying individuals difficult. The book spans six generations, and almost all the main characters are combinations of the same names.

For instance, Jose Arcadio Buendia has a child named Jose Arcadio, and Jose Arcadio has a son named Arcadio. Jose Arcadio is from the Buendia family line, so he is Jose Arcadio, the Buendia, but he's not the Buendia known as Jose Arcadio Buendia.

And Colonel Aureliano Buendia has 17 sons.... All of whom are named Aureliano.

The girls were doing better than the guys, but then you get three characters, all named Remedios, and you get a character named Amaranta Ursula, who is named after a character named Amaranta, and a character named Ursula.

During the first half of the book, everyone's names are slightly different. So even though everyone is reusing the same names, they're in a different order, or a different length, or are distinctive in some way. But during the second half, we get Jose Arcadio and Aureliano Buendia, whose names are complete replicas of two characters during the first half. And the author finds occasional excuse to bring up the names of these old characters in the same paragraphs of the new. And he doesn't make any effort to distinguish them, so the reader is left to puzzle out who's who based only on context.

And any character might disappear for 40 years, reappear randomly, and you're expected to remember all of his history and the symbolism associated with him.

And the writing style is something similar to a bulleted list, sans the bullets, so it's just throwing info at you at breakneck speeds, acting like nothing is out of the ordinary.

But despite all this, once I got into it, the memory-test aspect didn't really bother me. And besides, if you aren't determined to make the author out to be a bully, intentionally giving his readers a hard time, the individual aspects of the book that seem so confusing do actually make sense. The repetition of names is parallelism that is used to create some important themes, and the frankness of the style fits with the "magic realism" style, which I did actually become fond of.

But, I do have a few complaints.

The first is a technical one. The book starts out with Colonel Aureliano Buendia's final thoughts as he faced the firing squad. After these are thought and done with, they progress to the thoughts of Aureliano Segundo on his deathbed. After these are thought and done with.... the book just plugs on, like it forgot what it was doing. I severely doubt Marquez would use and emphasize such a technique, let alone repeat it, if it wasn't meant to be followed through to the end.

My second complaint is just a hunch I have that he copped out somewhere. In the entire book, there were only 2 characters that I was interested in seeing suffer the aging process. This is because there were only 2 characters whose key characteristics were near-divine physical attributes. These were Jose Arcadio the 1st and Remedios the Beauty. Both characters were oh-so conveniently killed off. I can't help but feel that, prematurely killing off the 2 characters that would be most difficult to write about the aging of, was a bit of a cop-out on Marquez's end.

My third complaint is one which I perceive to be character inaccuracy. I fully understand that shit happens, and so I'm not going to complain about things that just disappointed me, like Rebeca's descent into solitude, but I really don't think that Amaranta Ursula falling in love with Aureliano the Savage after he sort-of rapes her was a cool move on the author's side.

Now, having grown up in an anti-rape society, and acknowledging that I may have an unfair bias against rape, I'm gonna give Marquez a lot of leeway here. I acknowledge that in the timeframe this was written, power was seen a lot more primarily as being a physical thing, and I'm not a girl, so I can't say what's attractive and what isn't. A lot of women are taken by force in this book, and the only one I'm going to publish a complaint about is the event of Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano the Savage.

Amaranta Ursula pulled her husband to Macondo on a leash, forced him to put roots there, decided what the names of their children would be, threw Aureliano the Savage out of Melquiades' closet, and rennovated Macondo as best she could, with an unshaking resolve that lasted years. She was the most dominatrixy woman in the book, and her loving submission under an extremely aggressive man seemed to be the author finalizing his point that all women, regardless of individual variation, like being raped.

So... that kinda bugged me.

That culminates my confirmed complaints. There were a few things, however, that simply confused me, and which I'm not sure I'd call complaints, but which still left me really bothered.

For instance, what was the deal with the 17 Aurelianos being hunted? I know Colonel Aureliano Buendia threatened to destroy the banana company right before the Aurelianos began to be hunted down, so you can kinda make a connection there. But the final Aureliano isn't killed until years and years after the banana company has crumbled and Colonel Aureliano Buendia has died of old age. Why would the banana company kill someone to protect itself, when it hasn't existed for many years?

And... what was the deal with the whore house that didn't exist, which Aureliano the Savage and his friends would visit, where someone wrung the neck of a parrot and threw it into a stew, and where someone tried to burn it down both in an attempt to prove it wasn't real?

And the first and last mention of a monster, all happening within one paragraph near the end of the book was a little curious. And I was never completely sure what the deal with Fernanda's invisible doctors was.

I would love someone's opinion on this stuff. I just did some quick Google searches and turned up nothing.

And finally, before I wrap this up, I'd just like to point out a somewhat interesting observation:

Did anyone notice that, of his 4 friends, the one Aureliano the Savage likes best is a man named Gabriel. Gabriel's key feature is a love of books, and he has a friend named Mercedes. The author of the book is named Gabriel, he has a wife named Mercedes, and, being an author, I'm going to assume that he likes books.

Self-insertion!!!!!