One Hundred Years of Solitude

After hearing about it for so long, I have finally read the masterpiece of

Gabriel García Márquez. In 416 pages, One Hundred Years of Solitude felt like

some condensed Chinese mult-generation saga (I thought of Ordinary World which I

listened to a long time ago).

 

The Buendia family was among the founders of Macondo, a utopian town in

Columbia. The patriarch, José Arcadio Buendia, befriended Mel the gypsy, who

left volumes of manuscript to be finally deciphered by Aureliano, the only

5th-gen heir, to be the Sanskrit account to the last detail of all the family

members over more than 100 years, including the end of the line.

 

The author's imagination, the hyperboles, and wisdom make the book enjoyable

despite of my slow progress (about 70 pages a day). There were not so many new

words as in some of the crime novels I read earlier this year. I would say this

was in the top ten most entertaining English books for me so far. For example,

when it rained for three years non-stop, the author said on page 315,

    The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum

    out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms.

 

and on page 202, the author dispensed an interesting idea on living old,

    Colonel Aureliano could understand only that the secret of a good old age

    is simply an honourable pact with solitude.

 

Many episodes were memorable including

- how the Colonel survived shooting himself through a mark on the chest made by

  the doctor who anticipated the suicide attempt.

- how the message of José Arcadio's death reached Úrsula via a thread of blood

  that trickled through town and ended up in her kitchen.

- stories of Remedios the Beauty

- Aureliano (the 5th-gen) read through six volumes of the encyclopedia and

  discovered Sanskrit and thus the key to Mel's manuscript.

 

Short descriptions such as

- the girl with the stealthy beauty of a serpent of the Nile, and

- tortured Spanish

were just as unforgettable.

 

More than two dozens of characters over six generations confused me a bit toward

the end, especially when all the males in the family are named José, Arcadio, or

Aureliano or some combinations. I had to visit often the Buendia family tree at

the beginning of the book.