This was a strange one. The scope of it alone was enough to render it bewildering. It follows members of the Buendia line from their founding of the village Macondo to the death of a last male - over one hundred years. Alternating between intimate conversations and sweepingly general recollections, the author paints the character of a dynasty.
I thought this was going to be much more narrative. Not that there isn't a story to it. The scenes are so brief and are connected so conversationally that it reminds me of reading a diary. A diary of a family over 3 generations.
So aside from the daunting scale of the thing, I enjoyed the writing (it's translated from Spanish, so hard to tell what implications that has). I also enjoyed the mythology that follows the family through the matriarch, Ursula. She is warned that her children would be born with a pig's tail if she married Jose Arcadio, but she does it and only realizes in her senility that their fatal flaws were just as bad as pigs' tails.
The solitude theme was a big deal but I am still not entirely sure how to distill it into something rational out of all the masses of instances I've just acquired. It does seem though that each character lives only when they are in the family home and they reach out for contact between similar spirits. They die spiritually when they become absorbed by their work, or when they destroy a relationship. Always their physical death is penultimate, and their ghosts carry on to advise the survivors. The real death is when they seek their solitude and isolat themselves from the cares and joys of life.
Also, the familial naming tradition made it difficult to be sure entirely which Jose Arcadio, Aureliano, or Amaranta was being referenced at any time. Could have been a literary device to indicate that they were all the same Aureliano, just in a different era. I am going to treat it as purposeful rather than incidental and applaud the masterful execution.
Speaking of executions... so many! Not sentimentally referenced, or even excruciatingly described, but just numerous and varied. The Colombian civil war plays a large part in one Aureliano's life, and they get pretty free with the executions. The other ridiculous recurrence was incest. A father and son each having a child by the same woman, a nephew having a sneaky relationship with his aunt, another Aureliano accidentally marries his aunt, two brothers keep the same concubine, one adopted sister marries her brother. I don't think there are family curses, but heritable temperments would make certain sins repeated along a family line.
Conclusion: 3 out of 4. The main problem I had was keeping pace as the author did not accelerate or slow while providing a diary of 4 generations' births, deaths, loves, sins, and jealousies. It was just exhausting. Too great in detail for me to digest in 6 hours. It reminds me of Steinbeck's East of Eden, though I liked it less. Steinbeck should have gotten a Nobel Prize for Literature, although Mr. Garcia Marquez is supremely talented.
Next: Cocksure by Mordecai Richler.
*edited to add*: I've been thinking about this more and I think one of the excellent things the author does does this book is to show characters, not describe them. He demonstrates that this Jose Arcadio is active and vicious, while the other Jose Arcadio is active and generous, and another Jose Arcadio is silent and brutal. For this ability alone I could happily reccommend the writer to anyone. Also, my cousin called this a "magic realism" book and I like that description a lot! It blends the grand mythos ofhumanity with the dreary inanity of daily life. Good catch, cousin!
Finally, I seem to have contracted, from this book, a deep fear of dying in solitude. I had avoided it well up till now. Daaaang.
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