“The secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude.”

 

This is a fascinating book written in the style of “magic realism” that Gabriel García Marquez helped to popularize.  This means the book is essentially a piece of realist fiction with small, intriguing magical elements.  For example, one of the story’s central characters, Rebeca, remains alive after staying in a house without having been seen for half a century.  How could she possibly have survived without going out for food?  It is unclear, yet this mystery makes the story all the more intriguing, drawing the reader into the tale of the mysterious town of Macondo.

Another bizarre mystery of the story is how when another central character, Jose Arcadio, is shot dead his blood runs all the way from his house, down streets and round corners, to the house of his grandmother.  The description of this tragedy beautifully incorporates elements of realism by discussing the many everyday scenes this trail of blood passes.  For example, the blood, “went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went out through the pantry and came out in the kitchen where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.”  This juxtaposition of the everyday and the magical is perhaps the most striking example of the “magic realist” style in the entire book.

Elsewhere, Gabriel García Marquez’s description of the war is genuinely moving, as two characters the readers have known from childhood become monstrous and cold, having seen, and participated in, the horrors of war.  However, the most moving moments of the book come from the central character of the first half of the novel, Jose Arcadio Buendia.  Having founded the town of Macondo, he becomes obsessed with new inventions and eventually loses his mind.  The final descriptions of this man, that the book’s audience have genuinely formed a connection with in only a hundred pages, is deeply moving, with the forlorn image of this once happy man tied to a tree, being “soaking wet and sad in the rain,” and unable to communicate with the world providing a sombre note with which to end the first half of the novel.

For me, it is this ability that Gabriel García Marquez has to fuse personal tragedy with magical elements and real life events such as the Colombian war between the liberals and conservatives, that makes “One Hundred Years of Solitude” such a good book.