One Hundred Years of Solitude

While there are countless classic fiction novels that are astounding for both their genius and intellectual stimulation, few will be ultimately remembered as truly historically significant.

After time, these works will transcend best-of lists – which are always culturally subjective and often self-serving – for their lasting contribution to their respective communities of origin.

One such novel may be among my personal favorites: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.  It’s the story of the most famously fictionalized Latin American town, Macondo, and the six generations of the Buendía family implicit in its development and preordained apocalypse. José Arcadio Buendía, the grand patriarch, founds Macondo as an Edenic, isolated paradise.

However, his compulsive quest for knowledge and technology and the introduction of foreign enterprise irrevocably damage the town’s innocence. What follows is inevitable: personal hedonism, class division, unstable government, civil aggression and, ultimately, ruin.

García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate in literature, was intentional in his attempt give voice to what he considers uncensored, post-colonial Latin American history while promulgating a disturbing universal truth: The fate of humanity is driven by superstition, greed, corruption and violence. That is why prior knowledge of Macondo’s destruction is irrelevant. Instead, the sequence of cyclically destructive behaviors throughout the generations drives the beautifully convoluted story.

Though it is commonly suggested otherwise, there is no need to chart the lengthy, intricate list of characters. In fact, one of the novel’s themes is that the societal importance of genealogy is negligible. The Buendía men, for example, inherit from the patriarch one of two personalities according to name: The José Arcadios are brutish and self-serving, while the Aurelianos are reflective, revolutionary and creative.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the flagship of the Latin American Boom literary movement, celebrated for its intellectually-driven experimentation with reality and leftist political appeal, and criticized for its elitism, male-centrism, and association to Cuban politics. While the century-long rise and fall of Macondo is an apt microcosmic retelling of Latin America’s political and social instability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the analogy is clear in that no society is permanent – particularly those with unregulated governments and free-market economies.

This indictment by García Márquez, an ‘intellectual’ provocateur of Fidel Castro and his anti-imperialism, is unmistakable, and his first telltale symptom of communal downfall is individual sadness and alienation. This seems a pessimistic view, to be certain, but it is one wrought with realism, and it’s unsettling how relatable it is today.

Despite its ominous themes on humanity’s destructive and depressive nature, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a delightfully entertaining read filled with humor, hyperbolic characters and fantastical occurrences accepted as purely quotidian – literary elements that are largely palatable to today’s readers. For me, it always provokes reflection on the repetitive nature of history, on the predictability of social conduct, and on whether we truly have any control over the evolution of our society.