Too many Aurelianos!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a difficult but an worthwhile adventure filled with magical realism. 

I first heard about Gabriel Garcia Marquez (GGM) in 2014 when my friend wrote a post about him after his passing on Facebook. I was surprised at my ignorance about GGM and Latin literature in general. I decided to read his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude (OHYS). When I started reading the book, however, confusing names and convoluted timelines made it difficult to get past a couple of chapters. When I conveyed my predicament to my friend, she suggested the only way to conquer the book is by drawing a family tree.

Several years later, I would celebrate the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions by taking strolls across the streets of Berkeley. While walking, I came across OHYS lying on the sidewalk. My old inkling was rekindled and decided to give the book another try. Before reading the book, however, I heeded my friend’s advice by drawing the family tree of Buendias and embarked on an adventure.

But why start with the family tree? Because OHYS is a 400-page novel tracing seven generations of the Buendia family filled with five Arcadios, three Remedios, and more Aurielianos than I could count (actually, 22). The names become so repetitive that one character promises to name her child anything but Aurieliano or Remedios (only to name the child Aurieliano later). Initially, the repeated names became a nuisance as I spent half of the time looking back at the family tree before identifying the character and their relationship with others. Over time, however, I realized that the same character names were indicative of similar characteristics, with many repeating the actions and mistakes as their previous namesakes. Some were intensely boisterous and impulsive while others quiet and pensive. Yet, one characteristic connected them all — solitude.

Family tree of Buendia

The story is based in Macondo, an isolated city of mirrors founded by José Arcadio Buendía, which is initially cut off from the world. It was established with utopian principles but over time, greed and selfishness creep into the characters resulting in their destruction. This results in characters becoming increasingly solitary and unable to truly love anyone apart from themselves. There are rich sentences capturing this theme like, “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude” or “Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction” or “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

As Salman Rushdie remembers a joke told by his friend, “I have a feeling that writers in Latin America can’t use the word solitude anymore, because they worry that people might think it is a reference to Gabo [Gabriel Garcia Marquaez’s nickname]. And I am afraid,” he added, “soon we will not be able to use the phrase one hundred years either.”

While I read this a work of fiction, the book had references to historical events in Columbia which I later learnt. The war of ideology in the story closely resembles the war between Conservatives and Liberals between 1899 to 1902, and the massacre which killed three thousand protestors in the book resembles the ‘Banana Massacre’ of 1928 in Columbia.

If navigating one hundred Aurelianos wasn’t sufficient, the genre didn’t make it any easier. The book falls into the genre of magical realism (a genre the author of this article detested until now). The world of Macondo is filled with supernatural things that are considered normal. A character is swarmed with yellow butterflies around him; a beautiful girl ascends to heaven while folding white sheets; characters return from the dead as ghosts; the rain falls in Macondo for four years, eleven months, and two days. On the other hand, science and technology are considered a pariah and idiosyncratic. When the father states that the earth is round like an orange, his wife admonishes him for putting gypsy ideas into the heads of the children. While I faced challenges initially, once I delved deeper into the world of Macondo, I was able to accept absurdity as normal, quotidian events just like any other Macondoian but not without an involuntary chuckle.

The story follows the cyclical nature of life with future generations of Buendia committing similar mistakes as their previous generations. As one matriarch let out a deep laugh with resignation after Aureliano confesses incestuous sentiments about his cousin and states:

“There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.” This felt like a microcosm of the world where people and world leaders keep repeating the same mistakes committed by the previous generations even when the consequences of these actions in the past were terrible.

My favourite part of the book is the profoundly rich sentences that lit my eyes on almost every other page, which should be credited to GGM and also the translator, Gregory Rabassa. Some of my favourite lines include:

1. The first and one of the iconic lines in English literature:“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

2. Or when one of them realizes the futility of utopia: “Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

3. The race was condemned from the beginning: “Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Imitation is greatest form of flattery. In the end, let me summarize the book to my readers as follows: Many years later, when he read this summary, Ashwin Mb was to remember that distant afternoon when he picked the book to discover a masterpiece.