The beginning of this book blew me away. I loved the prose although I did wonder if it might be even better in the author’s native Spanish! It’s incredibly vivid and full of fun with almost cartoonish characters and magical situations and happenings. The whole things brims with an originality, creativity and vivacity that’s totally infectious. I loved the relationship between the original Buendia and Melquiades, his gypsy friend and trading partner, which is wonderfully rich and well described.
Sadly, the vibrant and engaging opening quickly gives way to future generations of Buendias and as these generations proliferate the characters become ever sketchier and events become increasingly haphazard and disjointed. Indeed, I found it very difficult to work out what was going on after about the halfway point. A family tree or list of characters is absolutely essential but, sadly, there was none in the edition I read. The confusion is deepened by the fact that the successive generations of Buendia’s all have the same names. I didn’t enjoy the second half nearly as much as the first largely because of the increasingly frenetic pace at which new characters and ideas are introduced only to be discarded in favour of even newer ones. This may have contributed to the following impression I formed during the latter part of the novel.
Namely, I found the characters and content of the second half of the book chaotic and orderless. The prose remains engaging and evocative but I started to feel like it was more of a collection of fantastical, broadly unconnected short stories rather than a coherent whole. Scenes such as the brothel filled with exotic animals struck me as flights of stylistic fancy with little or no connection to the broader plot. It made me wonder if there was an elaborate allegory contained within the novel to which I was completely oblivious, which I continue to entertain as a distinct possibility. However, the allegory would have to be very complicated, and the reader would have to have a very detailed knowledge of it, to require such an enormous cast.
Given my crescendo of confusion as the novel continued, I found myself wondering at the book's conclusion what I had really understood from this novel. Certainly, the repetitiveness or cyclicality of history and families was one theme I felt was ubiquitous. The book starts with a pig-child born of incest and finishes with the same. Characteristics and events are echoed down the generations and while it’s not the case that each generation lives the same life there was a definite sense of a historical cyclicality that is larger and more powerful than the individuals within it. Indeed, this sense of cyclicality, that prosperity will turn to poverty and hubris to nemesis, was an enjoyable aspect of the book for me. I only felt that it had been rather lost in the riot of characters and magical events.
Another theme that seemed to be contained in many of the magical happenings concerns a loss of senses. For example, for a long period in the town no one sleeps and, later on, Ursula goes blind. As to the wider significance of this, I was unsure. Perhaps it points to periods in history when everyone is in thrall to some new and fashionable idea and is unaware of the damage such a break with the past will bring; here I’m thinking mainly about the collective insomnia about which the townsfolk are initially enthusiastic before realising its drawbacks. Another incident with obvious historical and philosophical implications is the massacre of 3,000 people in the town square. This bloody incident and the denial of it by both the government and the banana company seem to point to the ability of powerful elites to manipulate the historical record and create their own reality quite apart from the facts of the situation. This section feels angry and politically motivated and may refer to the treatment of anti-government elements in the author’s native Columbia and subsequent revision of the historical record.
The role of women is clearly most directly encountered through the role of Ursula, the original Buendia’s wife and the matriarch of the family through the one hundred years covered in the book. Her resilient, capable character seems to illustrate the central importance of feminine influence within a family. However, the suffering of tormented men at the hands of Buendia women, for example Amaranta, preclude any simplistic interpretation of women struggling to maintain order and decency amidst a shower of immoral and impulsive men!
Both men and women indulge in the extremely wild and promiscuous sexual behaviour throughout the generations and the novel. There are large quantities of inappropriate sexual relations, incest and illegitimate children. However, this doesn’t necessitate equally large quantities of sexually explicit prose and it’s impressive that Marquez achieves the feeling of sexual intimacy and renders it vividly without being particularly graphic.
On the whole, my enjoyment of the book was marred by the proliferation of characters and circumstances in the second half. It was too much to keep track of and I felt the quality of each character or circumstance decreased the more of them Marquez kept adding! However, the quality of the prose and his incredible eye for details remained magical throughout. Never ending rains, a whole town without sleep, an orphan girl who’ll eat only whitewash and earth, a man followed constantly by swarms of yellow butterflies; these are only a few examples of features that really capture, and ignite, the imagination in a way few other books I’ve read have. For this reason, it’s a magical book. Albeit one best read in conjunction with something deeply practical and unmagical; a family tree!
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