After hearing about it for so long, I have finally read the masterpiece of
Gabriel García Márquez. In 416 pages, One Hundred Years of Solitude felt like
some condensed Chinese mult-generation saga (I thought of Ordinary World which I
listened to a long time ago).
The Buendia family was among the founders of Macondo, a utopian town in
Columbia. The patriarch, José Arcadio Buendia, befriended Mel the gypsy, who
left volumes of manuscript to be finally deciphered by Aureliano, the only
5th-gen heir, to be the Sanskrit account to the last detail of all the family
members over more than 100 years, including the end of the line.
The author's imagination, the hyperboles, and wisdom make the book enjoyable
despite of my slow progress (about 70 pages a day). There were not so many new
words as in some of the crime novels I read earlier this year. I would say this
was in the top ten most entertaining English books for me so far. For example,
when it rained for three years non-stop, the author said on page 315,
The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum
out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms.
and on page 202, the author dispensed an interesting idea on living old,
Colonel Aureliano could understand only that the secret of a good old age
is simply an honourable pact with solitude.
Many episodes were memorable including
- how the Colonel survived shooting himself through a mark on the chest made by
the doctor who anticipated the suicide attempt.
- how the message of José Arcadio's death reached Úrsula via a thread of blood
that trickled through town and ended up in her kitchen.
- stories of Remedios the Beauty
- Aureliano (the 5th-gen) read through six volumes of the encyclopedia and
discovered Sanskrit and thus the key to Mel's manuscript.
Short descriptions such as
- the girl with the stealthy beauty of a serpent of the Nile, and
- tortured Spanish
were just as unforgettable.
More than two dozens of characters over six generations confused me a bit toward
the end, especially when all the males in the family are named José, Arcadio, or
Aureliano or some combinations. I had to visit often the Buendia family tree at
the beginning of the book.
