100 Years of Responses
Chuck
book is a work of historical fiction or of fantasy. The people in
_One Hundred Years of Solitude_ seem like ordinary people. but they
have fantastic and otherworldly experiences. The Gypsies, especially
Melquíades, are a primary source of the magical aspect of the novel.
Their inventions and discoveries never cease to amaze the people of
Macondo.
Gabriel García Márques does a wonderful job of blending the real
with the imaginary. Whether he is describing magnets and magnifying
glasses or magic carpets and alchemy, he writes deliberately and makes
even fantastic objuects seem ordinary. He makes the reader feel that
Prudencio Aguilar's ghost really could've befriended José Arcadio
Buendía and that the plague of insomnia could have been a historically
real epidemic.
II. Even halfway through the book, the number of characters and the
lack of clearly distinct names makes _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ a
difficult book to read. I don't really understand why all the men in
the family are either named Aureliano or (José) Arcadio. Maybe it's a
cultural thing.
The second hundred or so pages of the book differs from the
first hundred pages in that the first hundred pages felt much more
mystical. The novel after war breaks out seems entirely different
from the novel before. Before the war, the novel seems to be about a
small village named Macondo that is somewhat isolated from the rest of
the world by the swamps that surround it. However, with the start of
the war, _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ turns into a novel about a
town torn apart by the political battle between liberals and
conservatives. All of a sudden, Gabriel Márques brings the whole
country into focus and seems to put the novel on fast-forward.
III. As I am reading this book, I find myself asking the following
question: Am I really reading the same novel that I started out
reading? The story's mood and tempo has changed so much in just a
couple hundred pages.
At the beginning of the novel, I was excited about the growth of
Macondo and the visits of the Gypsies. However, now I am disgusted at
what Macondo has grown into. It has lost much of its magic and gained
a machine-like mechanicalness.
The change in tempo also changes the feel of the sotry a great
deal. No longer do the people of Macondo seem to go about life
methodically, but rather they have begun to go about their lives with
a great rapidity. The acceleration of life in the story is akin to
the acceleration of real life. As more things are invented to
increase our leisure time, we find ourselves having less and less time
to enjoy the world around us.
IV. Once again, I am deeply impressed with Gabriel Márquez's use of
mood. With the beginning of the rains, Macondo no longer is a small
prosperous village where the sun shines on houses painted white, but
it is a ghost town where the mud never dries and where there is no
vitality. Just as the court declared that the workers of the banana
company didn't exist, it seems that Macondo never really existed
either.
The sotryline of _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ seems to be
circular. What happens at the beginning of the story appears again at
the end. For example, Melquíades plays a large role at the beginning
of the novel and then almost completely disappears in the middle of
the storyline. However, at the end of the novel, he reappears to talk
with Aureliano. Also, the rains seem to bring back the magic present
in the first chapters of the book which was lost in the middle
sections.
V. I really enjoyed reading this novel. It reminded me a lot of
_Things Fall Apart_. In both novels, the coming of external authority
leads to the eventual downfall of the villages.
I find Gabriel Márquez's and Chinua Achebe's writing styles to
be very similar. As demonstrated in _One Hundred Years of Solitude_
and _Things Fall Apart_, both authors are adept at writing about a
series of events that span a long time and bridge generations, both
are able to give depth to their characters, and both are excellent at
creating mood.