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New Review of an Oft-Reviewed Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude

By Sarah Stodola

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Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds me of compulsive liars. It's fiction, of course, and so not meant to be taken as true, but it has the same tone as that of someone who will say anything to get a listener's attention. It's full of stories posing as realistic, posing as somethings that might have really happened, but are too outlandish to ever be believed.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece is realism without the realism. He speaks in the voice of reality, using realistic events and a real country and a real war and a realistic town, but every thought and action within this framework is exaggerated to the point of absurdity, to the point that if you heard these kinds of stories in conversation with someone in a bar, you would tune them out, only nodding occasionally in order to humor the speaker. And this speaker would never be someone who you would lend any credence to. Fans have dubbed this form of storytelling "magic realism" - the combination of the fantastic and the realistic. Many have called it brilliant, but to me it seems more like the author knew that his realism wasn't interesting enough to stand on its own, so it had to be enhanced with the surreal.

The title of the novel suggests a solemn and introspective work. The content, however, is anything but. One Hundred Years follows the Buendia family through several generations, as it establishes the town of Macondo and watches its rise and eventual downfall. We witness war, suicide, murder, insanity, unrequited love, overly requited love. Seldom do we see introspection in any traditional sense. There's no time for introspection, after all, when someone is continually either being born or dying or killing or going crazy.

One of the first requirements of any novel is that it must convince readers to care about its characters. It's difficult to care about those in One Hundred Years for two reasons; first, there are too many of them to keep track of, much less get to know and care about, despite the family tree laid out on the first page of the book, and second, there is nothing to know of them but their most dramatic moments and traits. We only learn of a physical trait of a character if that trait is extreme, as in Jose Arcadio's massive physical presence. We only learn of their thoughts and feelings in the same manner. If we were able to know the characters in their more prosaic moments, we might feel the same shock and sympathy that they do when the big moments in their lives come. But if all we are ever offered are big moments, it becomes impossible to keep caring about them. We become desensitized to the drama of their lives when that's all we are ever given, line after line, for almost 400 pages.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is generally considered to be a contemporary classic. Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature. His work has been translated into countless languages. An hispanic friend of mine spoke lovingly of One Hundred Years not because of the story or the characters, but because of the language. She read it in the language it was written in, Spanish. I read it in English, the only language in which I am able to read complex novels. Perhaps I was therefore unable to experience the thing that makes the novel great. On the other hand, if a book is as good as this one is supposed to be, and its translator is competent, its essence should survive the conversion to another language. Either way, a novel has to do more than sound pretty in order to be great. It has to say something that hasn't been expressed before, or touch its readers' intellectual sensibilities, or inspire real world progress.

Marquez has said that the latter is what he hoped for in writing One Hundred Years. He wanted to inspire change in his native Columbia, or in all of Latin America. I am no expert on Columbia. I have never been south of Mexico (except in Africa, which doesn't apply here), and I have never studied the region very strenuously. Admittedly, this may contribute to my not "getting" the novel. But the very fact that nothing in the 400 pages makes me feel like I could ever relate to these characters in any way at all, even if the novel were set in my hometown in Kentucky, overrides any distance that may crop up simply because I am not overly familiar with the country and culture in which it is actually set.

I have a confession to make; I didn't read the whole book. When I was younger, I never quit a book in the middle. But I'm getting older, and time is becoming more precious, and after two hundred pages of One Hundred Years, I had enough. Two hundred pages wasn't the whole book. But it was more than half. Fifty years of Solitude. And that was quite enough for this reader.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three