One Hundred Years of Solitude – A Book Review

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Rating: 5/5

Reading good literature is a joy. It often brings a smile on the lips or a teardrop in the eye. But sometimes, it makes you ill. It causes your gut to curl, heart to break, and destroys your spirit for a few days. That’s what One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez did to me. It took me to a world so stark, so dark, so distraught, that when I returned to reality, I couldn’t sleep well for a few nights. I couldn’t muster the courage to gather my thoughts around what I had read, let alone write a full review. 

It also happened when I read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Orwell’s 1984. While those are completely different, the effect that those novels had on me was quite similar. I hate to go through such a phase, but I absolutely love these works. They have had a lasting impact on me, and One Hundred Years of Solitude is right up there, with the very best works of fiction.

How I Found One Hundred Years of Solitude

Partly due to Bombay Reads and partly due to my sheer love for stories, I’m always looking for great works. Recent or old, doesn’t matter. In fact, I confess that I prefer novels that have managed to excite readers for a great passage of time, which is a kind of a filter to weed out books pushed by marketing and algorithms. And on my quest of finding the greatest novels of all time, I found One Hundred Years of Solitude on every recommendation list. Luckily, being a student at the University of Portsmouth gave me access to a great library with a phenomenal collection of literature. Quite surprisingly, I never found this great work on the streetside bookstall in Mumbai. That’s a big deal, because those streets hold more books than most libraries in the city.

I was working on my dissertation when I got my hands on this masterpiece. Whenever I got frustrated with financial models and the Bloomberg Terminal screens, I took time out to read the novel. More often than not, the breaks lasted for hours. Between multiple spreadsheets and shifts at the Portsmouth International Port, I managed to complete this challenging book. Challenging not due to language or length, but its power to twist your emotions. At the end, I was quiet and couldn’t dare think about what I’d just read till the time I submitted the dissertation. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Story of Macondo

At the very core of it, I believe that the novel is about Macondo, the town that witnessed glory and turmoil, bloom and blood over a century of its existence. Symbolism aside, to me, it reads like a bloodied history of Colombia, the violent conflicts between the Conservatives and Liberals, the regime and the rebels. To make it even more bloodied, it depicts the rise of colonialism in the garb of progress and development. The mode remains quite familiar – the railways! 

Macondo was founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia, the head of the Buendia family and father of Colonel Aureliano Buendia. The inception of the town is a classic romantic tale – founded by refugee families, who built it brick by brick. Festivities, fairs, nomadic gypsies – and magic, a lot of it. In fact, ask any literature student who’s studied the novel as part of a curriculum, the first thing they’d likely say is “magical realism,” a literary style that blends magic with reality.  That’s how it starts, happy and merry. But with every chapter, the novel becomes darker and darker, with light popping up here and there. 

The Buendía Curse: Passion, Obsession, Solitude

The Buendia family is the centerpiece of Macondo, with generations named Jose, Arcadio, Aureliano, and multiple combinations of these names. It may appear very confusing, but believe me, every character is unique to leave its mark on you. Yet, all of them, along with the numerous Ursulas, Amarantas, and Remedioses, have something in common, which can be defined the best as the curse of the Buendia family. 

Macondo blooms at the onset, becoming a cultural centre with a thriving market. The Buendias and other founding clans became wealthy. Ursula, the matriarch of the Buendia family, is the driving force of prosperity, and she lives for over a hundred years. However, a few years after arriving in Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia gets obsessed with theories, inventions, and experiments, so much that it drives him insane. 

The two sons, Jose Arcadio and Aureliano Buendia become two opposite individuals. Jose, the elder one, leaves Macondo for his adventures with the gypsies, only to return years later as a fully grown brute of a man. Aureliano grows to be a silent man, with few friends and interests. Eventually, the younger son becomes the leader of the liberal rebellion, and takes the title of Colonel Aureliano Buendia. Colonel Aureliano spends years fighting against the conservative regime in lands far and wide. Throughout his ‘noble’ expeditions, he fathers 17 sons, all named Aureliano! 

Sadly, as is proved throughout history, the romantic rebellions of the righteous rebels are crushed, with families butchered along with the fighters. After fighting for years, Colonel Aureliano Buendia returns to Macondo, and lives a life of solitude, crafting small gold fishes for a living. When the atrocities of the regime inspire him to rebuild his forces against the regime, this time with the 17 Aurelianos, his hopes are crushed beyond repair. He resigns from life, and lives quietly in the Buendia house until his death. 

While the rebel commander is dead, the story of Macondo continues, and so do the tragedies of the Buendia family. And with every passing generation, Macondo deteriorates even more, moving farther and farther away from its days of glory. 

Significance of One Hundred Years of Solitude

For someone who grew up in the late 1990s and 2000s, colonialism was something only from history textbooks. Often boring, and seldom a fancy of students. I have had the good fortune of reading some remarkable works that depict the heinous phenomenon that was European colonialism. One Hundred Years of Solitude is right up there with the best works of fiction that highlight the profound impact colonialism had on generations across the globe. 

I recently reviewed Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which depicted the arrival of imperial powers in Africa. Gabriel García Márquez’s magnum opus is equally riveting to read and has a definitive, long lasting impact on the readers. While Achebe’s Umofia shows the advent of colonialism in Nigeria, Macondo depicts the aftermath of colonialism and the rise of neocolonialism, at the forefront of which were capitalist powers of the west. 

The corrupt political systems that the colonial powers leave behind, the struggle of the common folk, the romance of revolution and the tragic end of it, all come alive and together in this masterful work. Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude made me realise something that, though I knew it, was never in my focus. Colonialism is the link between South America, Africa, and Asia. People in South Asia seldom read about Spanish colonialism because it did not reach our shores. Yet, the pain is common and equal. 

In the fast-changing geopolitical world, it is essential for us to find a common, humanizing ground for friendship across continents, and the horror of colonialism and neocolonialism is very strong common ground. The South Asians, Africans, and the Latino suffered similar atrocities, albeit at the hand of different oppressors. One Hundred Years of Solitude, in showing the fall of Macondo, showed what actually happens across the erstwhile colonies, and how the masters have a new face. Earlier, they had whips and canons. Now, they have coldrinks and AI.