One Hundred Years of Solitude
This is a masterpiece of a novel by a foremost Latin American novelist in contemporary literature. The story is weaved around a family which moves over two centuries of pain, suffering and ecstasy and shares them with the town of Macando founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia and who is the first head of the family. Despite the extrovert nature of most of the family members, the successive generations in the family continue to suffer a strange and an almost nauseating feeling of being alone and embracing solitude.
Through the family line, there are two discernible strands of personality symbolized by Arcadio and Aurelanio- the former typifying the extrovert self coupled with an adventurous spirit and the latter typifying the rebellious and the subtle spirit. The novel evolves through the contradictions and struggle between the two strands of nature through five generations.
The repetition of the Arcadios and Aurelanios makes one feel that history is moving in a circle and out of which there seems to be no way out. Yet that is not the case. For the novel is not about a family in the far- off jungles of South America. The family and its experiences are only a metaphor.
The tale that Garcia wants to tell is about our own selves. The trails and tribulations of the family are not something new and unrelated, but part of our existential set of problems. Arcadio and Aurelanio are not two separate beings but very much the dual personalities within ourselves. Solitude is perhaps the pinnacle of the existential predicament. And as Garcia warns the discerning reader, no race of people is fortunate enough to experience its past again. No man is reborn,.
If one has to break the cyclical, aimless wandering of the spirit, it has to be done now. In this sense, this novel is a call to action, not a mere novel to be read and forgotten. It is an elixir that has to be absorbed inside the body such that it becomes a part of the Self.
The narrative of the novel is not straightforward but moves through a maze of subtle and often innocuous looking images and metaphors so that one finds ghosts and phantoms of the dead and the forgotten moving and interacting with the live and the real. The transmission of the ideas and inventions from the world outside to the remote village of Macando takes place through the wandering gypsies so that what reaches them is a bunch of scattered and seemingly unrelated ideas.
The formation of the world- view of the founder Arcadio Buendia and his successors evolves through this mixture of myth, fantasy and science through the corruptions of the spoken word, mingled with songs and tales. Flying carpets and disappearing acts are a part of the hazards. The untiring and fruitless efforts of the alchemists and the dreams of the pioneers of flying transport one to the times of struggle and hope. Of ecstasy and excitement.
One also shares the rigors and defeats of the Auriliano Buendia, who fights 32 battles and loses them all. Naturally, he fights on behalf of the revolutionary forces. But ultimately, his craving for solitude overpowers him and he surrenders- both in the field as well as spiritually. He ends up as a lost man with a lost cause. By the time he realizes his error, it is already too late and his friends are no more to start a fresh war with the Conservative government. But he, too, leaves behind a rich legacy which his nephew tries to carry forward with equally disastrous results. And then the town relapses into obscurity again. Auriliano Buendia, the once legendary hero, too is forgotten, remembered only by the only great grandchild that survives.
-Bhupinder
6th August 1991
