Book Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years is the tale of a flat infinite earth, covered by an unending ocean, birthing a land mass, in this case a dramatic mountain peak, bathed in soft South American sunshine, shooting up into jagged existence, at once haunting and dominating the horizon.
It rises up from the depths in fiery passion as a volcano; volatile, fertile, malleable lava bursts from the earth’s molten core hardening into an eager form, distinctly phallic in shape, rank with life, fertility, sexuality, reality, virility and femininity, sitting on an stubborn bedrock of imagination, dream and conjecture.
We are deceived at first by the darting mountain’s keen early progress, blind to the endemic deceleration dooming it from the time of its conception. Like us, the mountain begins to die, not at senility, but at birth. Teeming with busy energy, the mountain seeks to increase its bulk and so - unwise as it is to mine oneself - it compromises, fuses ambitiously with weaker, neighbouring soils, and invites foreign folk to land - by sea, by land, by air - importing different culture, different attitudes. But no amount outside of help can spare us: we all must face - must solve – our personal challenges alone, if at all. Growth and new technologies have benefits and costs, yet each are ultimately are moot in the face of time: witness a life succumbing to persistent entropy and exhaustion, the creeping encroachment of nature lays bare a mutability of complexity and unsustainability of circuitous self-reference.
This all is a metaphor for the narratives of One Hundred Years of Solitude, tales of the individual, the family, the community and the society, all superimposed, and revealed at a pitch perfect pace, resonating and culminating in a final epic, eternal chord of immaculate harmony. The brilliance of Garcia Marquez’s craft is the orchestration of these stories in symphony. So seamless is the style that both the violent vigorous creation and gradual unavoidable demise occur at a constant speed to our perception allowing the reader equal time to learn love attach to and morn both crescendo and decrescendo, inhalation and exhalation, rise and fall.
The mountain landscape created in this work is not relayed to us as definite in its meaning, never dogmatic, never brutally certain, rather it concedes to us that it is equally buoyed and burdened by being so long, big, broad and labyrinthicly intratwined to be dizzyingly beyond human comprehension. That we navigate the terrain with our own unique orienteering is both the book’s imminent weakness and its boundless strength. I admit as a reader I surely did not grasp as much - tearing through the last few hundred pages - as I could have from savouring them in calculated contemplation. So much does it strive to offer us as we pass through its covers that the capacity of my embrace was soon overwhelmed, and many a ripe treasure was unfortunately left in darkness as I turned the last page to close the book. One Hundred Years is a mountain climb, thus, depending on the angle from which it is approached, the only thing in common between any two summit-attempts is the view from the top.
Eventually, breaking from our reverie of looping intricacies in repeating patterns, we see the returning waves of the ocean batter the tired cliff and pull what remains below the surface. Somewhere in the confusion, we had lost ourselves and levitated, we hang as a spectator in mid-air, watching a diminishing island disappear below the tides. Squinting into the water in a desperate effort to see the past, what already sunken beneath, we search in vain hope it will reveal to us a prediction for the future. And just as finally the island slips under water for good we sense intuitively a wave of relief that the mountain’s mass is returning, in peaceful resignation, to the fiery molten from which it came.