One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez once before, but despite loving Love in the Time of Cholera, this time the author’s overblown, ornate style irritated me so much that I gave the book up. I think I struggled because this author’s books are such a big experience that they need some time in between reading them to fully appreciate the enormity of the stories. When I joined The Classics Club though, I added One Hundred Years of Solitude to my list of fifty classics to be read within five years of joining.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of the multi-generational Beundia family. Confusingly, most of the men are named either Jose Arcadio or Aureliano or variations of these names. They also live for extraordinarily long times, meaning that at any one time, there is a multitude of characters getting around with the same or similar names. I struggled right up until the last page to work out which character the story was following at any particular time. Luckily the fantastical events in the story kept me wondering what on earth would happen next, regardless of who it was happening to. Magical events were mixed in to the everyday and since none of the characters questioned the outrageously ridiculous things that happened, after a few eyebrow-lifting events I decided to go with the flow too and from then on believed everything I read. If you are a reader who is unable to believe unbelievable things, then this story may not be for you.

The first Jose Arcadio founded the town of Maconda on the side of the river in a jungle. He and his wife Ursula Iguaran left their hometown to escape the ghost of a man Jose Arcadio killed after a cockfight, because the man insulted him by commenting on the rumour that Jose Arcadio and Ursula Iguaran had not consummated their marriage. (The man was right, they hadn’t. Jose Arcadio and his wife were cousins and she fought off his advances with the assistance of a pair of sailcloth drawers reinforced by leather belts which her mother made for her in the fear that any children they had would be born with the tail of a pig).

At first Maconda was so remote that the only visitors were gypsies, who introduced ice and magnets to the villagers. Jose Arcadio became obsessed by these seemingly magical items and withdrew from everyday life to study them, occasionally coming to scientific realisations that were already known in the world the reader knows. In later life, Jose Arcadio went mad and his family tied him to a chestnut tree for years.

As time went on, Maconda became less remote and Jose Arcadia and Ursula Iguaran’s son Aureliano went off to a civil war where he become a famous leader who survived multiple attempts on his life. When he got sick of war, Colonel Aureliano Beundia spent another year brokering peace (killing many more men in order to bring this about) then spent his old age making and re-making fish from gold.

Later, the railway and a banana plantation came to Maconda, exposing the younger generation to the American way of life, eventually leading to the massacre of thousands of plantation workers. The grandchild of the first Jose Arcadio, Jose Arcadio Segunda, was the only survivor and strangely, was also the only person who was aware of or who remembered the massacre. What this meant, I don’t know.

By the end of the story, Maconda was almost destroyed after years of rain. After generations of Beundias, there were only two left, another Aureliano and Amaranta who do not realise they are aunt and nephew. They fell in love and had a child, who was born with the tail of a pig.

There is so much happening in this story, with so many characters over seven generations that it often verges on being overwhelming. Every page has something different happening to what might have been expected and every sentence is so enormously descriptive that if anyone lesser than this author had written it, the story could have been buried. Because of this, the story must be read carefully. One Hundred Years of Solitude is probably a book which improves with a second or even a third read.

This is a book which would be a pleasure to read aloud, although who has time for that? From time to time, I read paragraphs aloud to myself (no, not on the train,) wishing I could roll my ‘Rrr’s.’

The sort of moral values and events which disturbed me in Love in the Time of Cholera are rampant throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude too. Incest, rape and relationships between older men and girls so young that in most cultures they would be thought children, are common. So many people are killed during everyday life, throughout the war and as a result of the massacre that I became unfeeling, much like the difference in the emotion felt when you hear about the death of 200 people in a country that you couldn’t pinpoint on a map compared to the death of someone you know and love. In addition, there are so many characters and the action changes so quickly that it is impossible to feel connected or to care about the characters.

However, the beauty and fullness of each sentence make this book worthwhile and thinking about the events of the story as if it is a fairy tale allowed me to read on without feeling upset about events which in real life would be abhorrent.

I preferred Love in the Time of Cholera (link below) to One Hundred Years of Solitude because it was a less convoluted story, following two people who were in love when they were young but unable to become a couple until their old age. I’ll give myself a break of a year or two from this author before reading whatever I can next find by him.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude was book eight for my Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of 26 August 2023.

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Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez left me feeling enormously conflicted.

I loved the author’s ornate, over the top, descriptive, and emotive writing style, which was perfectly suited to this story of love and romance in the Caribbean, although the style wouldn’t work for an Australian author. Some laconic bloke would say, “Putting on the dog,” and the writer would be condemned to the shelves for women’s fiction forever.

The plot of Love in the Time of Cholera is straightforward; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, will the boy ever win the girl’s heart again?

The story is set around the turn of the century and follows three main characters, the beautiful Fermina Daza, her first love, Florentino Ariza, who by the end of the story has loved her for nearly 60 years, and Fermina’s husband, Dr Juvenal Urbino.

Love in the Time of Cholera starts with the main characters in their old age. Fermina is in her seventies and her husband in his eighties when he dies, falling off a ladder while attempting to rescue his pet parrot from the high branches of a mango tree. Florentino uses the opportunity to go to Fermina’s home to assist her with the immediate necessities after a death in the house, and finishes the day by telling Fermina that he still loves her. Hopeless timing, but poor old Florentino couldn’t help himself.

Fermina and Florentino met in their youth, when Florentino fell in love with Fermina at first sight. He wooed her with love letters, which they exchanged frantically. Like most teenagers even now they were both in love with love, rather than with each other, as they rarely met or spoke to each other, but when Fermina’s father found out about the romance, he took Fermina away for several years to break the young couple up. They continued to exchange telegrams while she was away, but when Fermina returned to her home town and they met again, she fell out of love with Florentino, just like that.

Enter Doctor Juvenal Urbino, who first met Fermina when she was his patient. Fermina initially disliked him enormously, but eventually gave in to her father’s wishes and married him.

I loved the first part of the story, which was the sweet, innocent romance of teenagers, but the second half was a different story again, because the characters discovered sex. The remainder of the story tells of Fermina’s, the Doctor’s and Florentino’s romantic and sexual encounters, starting with the married couple on their honeymoon in Europe.

Despite swearing eternal love for Fermina, Florentino became the most promiscuous man around town. He particularly enjoyed spending time with widows, but he really wasn’t very picky. Not only that, his morals! In his old age Florentino was messing around with a very young teenager, who was his god-daughter to boot! And Florentino had the audacity to believe that this child was loving their time together as much as he was, or so the author said…

Surprisingly, Florentino didn’t die of a nasty STD.

Doctor Juvenal Urbino had his share of adventures too. He wasn’t a faithful husband, and hurt Fermina’s pride enormously when she literally sniffed out that he was having an affair. A large portion of the second half of the novel tells of the ups and downs of their married life, and how they eventually came to be dependent on each other in the way that people who have spent a lifetime together are.

Up until the point where Fermina and the Doctor married, reading this novel was making me feel happier than I’ve been in years. I don’t buy many books, but had decided that Love in the Time of Cholera was going to make it onto my shelves. I was seductively lured into the sex scenes on Fermina and the Doctor’s honeymoon and enjoyed them too. Nothing too descriptive, although by the time Florentino gave in to lust, a few practices made me raise my eyebrows (while laughing, because the writing is beautiful and funny). But then, bam! All of a sudden I’m reading about a woman who was raped, who says she will never have another lover who can measure up to her rapist. What? Then bam, again! Florentino and his very, very young god-daughter. Maybe things were different on this unnamed island in the Caribbean over 100 years ago, but I’m a product of a different age and found these affairs really distasteful. I don’t know if they were supposed to be funny, or tongue in cheek, and if they were, I’ve missed the whole point. If not, well, the ego of this writer is ridiculous, if he honestly thinks this is how things work.

My conflict about this story was the depravity of some characters versus the beautiful writing.

I felt uncomfortable and sordid while I was reading Lolita, which is the story of an older man’s affair with his step-daughter. I don’t feel sordid after finishing Love in the Time of Cholera though, despite the behaviours which are completely unacceptable in any day and age.

What I liked was that the characters live their lives fully. I like that in Love in the Time of Cholera love is for old people as well as for young. I adored the order of the words and the fullness of the sentences and how the detailed paragraphs and descriptive chapters built up to make the story live.

Say this sentence aloud; “But when it was indispensable she would, with sorrow in her heart, give free rein to a character of solid iron.”

Or, when someone intruded on a couple enjoying a private moment, the intruder congratulated the man, then said, “And you, Senorita, feel free to carry on. I swear by my honor that I have not seen your face.” Gorgeous.

The characters acknowledge truths which most of us try to ignore for the sake of a happy life, including the boredom of a stable marriage, the ridiculousness of falling in love with love and the indignities of growing older.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so clearly I’m not the only person who thinks he wrote some on the most beautiful things ever written. Despite my misgivings about the character’s behaviour, I probably will buy this book and will read everything else that I can get my hands on by this author.