Friday, April 02, 2010

As The Family Goes, So Too, The Town

There are great works of literature I've read, that for one reason or another were a chore to read. The subject matter or themes didn't interest me, or the writing style was not appealing to me*. Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude is not one of those books. It took longer for me to read than a book its length normally would, but I attribute that to the density of the story. It pays to stop more frequently than I normally would, to keep everything that's happened straight in my mind.

The extremely simple plot description: This is story of the village of Macondo, stretching from its establishment until its destruction, with a focus on the Buendia family, who were critical in its founding, and present throughout its existence. That doesn't even being to describe the book, but I don't want this to turn into a plot summary, which wouldn't do the book justice.

One of the keys of the book is the sense of time repeating itself. The Buendias tend to reuse names for their children, and those with the same names tend to share the same characteristics. For example, the patriarch is Jose Arcadio Buendia, whose eldest son is Jose Arcadio. His son is Arcadio, and one of his sons is Jose Arcadio Segundo. Jose Arcadio Segundo's twin brother, Aureliano Segundo, has a son named Jose Arcadio**. Aureliano is similarly a oft-used name. The Aurelianos tend to be distant, cold, and frequently obsess over a single thing. The Arcadios are more gregarious, more loud, more prone to flights of fancy. The exceptions are the Segundo twins, but there's a catch. The matriarch, Ursula Iguarian, knows the boys used to switch the bracelets bearing their names and pretend to be each other, and she suspects at some point the boys forgot which of them was which. So Aureliano Segundo, who would shift his focus repeatedly from being a good husband, to devoted father, to a good provider, to a wild party boy, was actually Jose Arcadio Segundo, and Jose Arcadio Segundo, withdrawn, rarely seen, obsessed with the writings of the dead gypsy Melquiades, was really Aureliano Segundo. ultimately, the two die simultaneously, and are confused by the pallbearers, who bury them in each other's graves. If Ursula was correct, this would simply be a correction of the mistake they'd been making for decades.

The repetition of names and traits goes along with the idea that with time repeating itself, the people keep making the same mistakes. The villagers are repeatedly involved in struggles lead by a member of the Buendia family, who is often not involved for the best of reasons. Many of those people die, though the Buendia usually survives long enough to see their struggle rendered meaningless. A generation of two later, it will happen again. The details may be changed, but the results are the same. Given this, it isn't surprising that people in the story tend to have spotty memories, and not only during the insomnia plague which lead to mass amnesia. If a character shuts themselves off from the others, they are usually forgotten until someone stumbles across them, or hears their name mentioned by someone else who stumbled across them. This may seem strange, but this is a town where people share their name with several ancestors, ancestors who may still be roaming the town as ghosts, clearly visible. Confronted so often with people who ought to be left in the past, it makes more sense how one can forget about the actual living.

I mentioned the ghosts, so I have to try and discuss "magical realism". That's the term I see applied to the story repeatedly online. Basically, things which seem like magic are presented as perfectly normal parts of life, no more unusual than things we take for granted. Early in the story, gypsy troops will pass through Macondo, bringing various items they've learned of, or harnessed. In this, flying carpets are presented as no more or less strange than magnets, or a magnifying glass. This was one of the things I had the most trouble growing comfortable with. I kept thinking the magic was meant to refer to something else, that the carpets weren't really flying. What helped was while reading the "About the Author" section Marquez describes how as a child he grew up with his grandparents, and in their stories, all events were presented the same, no matter how fantastic or mundane they might sound. It seems Marquez adopted this technique for the story. This means the time Jose Arcadio Buendia took his sons to see ice is presented as equally extraordinary to Melquiades returning from the dead. This helps to make all the disparate events feel as though they do take place in the same world. So as a reader, I came to accept not only are there ghosts, but those ghosts age like the living, that people can turn into snakes and back again, or vanish a puff of smoke. Having accepted all that, the idea that people can be so easily forgotten, or that time would seem to be repeating itself comes easily.

The story's written from a third-person perspective, but it moves residence from one character's mind to the other. This means we have an opportunity to gain every character's perspective, to learn their motivations, fears, passions. The end result is that even with characters I don't particularly like (Fernanda, for example), I understand where they're coming from and at least sympathize with them. It also serves to demonstrate how certain drives or follies keep determining the course of events, that looping of time again.

I've barely scratched the surface of everything that's in this book. It's an engaging read, and I think you'd find it goes quickly. It's not a story for slapstick, where the misfortunes of the family are played for jokes, as there's more a sense of grim inevitability to their destruction, but there are light moments. Aureliano Segundo has an amusing response to his wife's daylong diatribe about her treatment by his family, and Ursula's coping with Jose Arcadio Buendia is amusing as well. The strongest recommendation I can make is that now I want to go to the library and read the other of Marquez' works they had there, The General In His Labyrinth.

* Victorian literature, which from my experience is extremely wordy, is an example of a style I didn't enjoy. Too much dithering about, rather than getting to the point. The dangers of authors being paid per page or word.

** This may all sound confusing, but there are two mitigating factors. One, Marquez always refers to them the way I've written the names above. "Jose Arcadio" always refers to the son of Jose Arcadio Buendia, until the second Jose Arcadio, who isn't born until long after the first Jose Arcadio is dead. Also, right next to the first page of the story is a family tree laying out all the Buendias and how they're related, again, using the names they are referred to in the story.

2 comments:

Rol said...

If you've not read it, I'd recommend Love In The Time Of Cholera also.

CalvinPitt said...

rol: I have not, so I'll have to add it to the list. Thanks for the suggestion.