Over the last year, I have noticed that foreign writers have a different writing style than American ones. They capture the human experience so differently, they write about it so beautifully that I wonder if they know something we don’t. Is it because their culture and heritage is older than America’s? Were they raised with such a different view of the world and the human experience? Whatever the answer, their novels speak to my heart in a way that no American author has before. From Nina George, to Aime Cesaire, Franz Fallon, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, Yoko Ogawa, and now Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my understanding of writing and all of the style choices that come with it has been expanded for the better. Especially now that I’ve finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, I realize how important it is to read all forms of literature, not just the ones you grew up with, and to read a diverse set of authors. Being a writer, I know reading international authors has opened my eyes to a variety of writing styles, choices, and themes. I haven’t yet read an international author whose work didn’t affect me in some way and Garcia Marquez is no exception.
Yes, his novel has numerous fantastical elements, yes, there is murder, incest, and all sorts of crazy things happening, yes, many of the characters have the same name, but none of that detracts from the heart of the story-it is a story about family. Whether by marriage, blood, or adoption, every character is part of the Buendia family. And they are all so real. Melquiades, with his wisdom and kindness, mentors several of the Buendia men. Jose Arcadio Buendia has his obsession with inventions and progress and alchemy that eventually leads him to go mad. Ursula Buendia, with her strength and fortitude, as well as being a mother, runs a business and the town, keeps her family as safe as she can, and puts them in their places without fear such as in the case of cruel Arcadio. Pilar Ternera, mother of two Buendia boys, always there to comfort and care for the Buendia boys, caretaker of the past. Aureliano Buendia, first a quiet boy, then a colonel in a civil war, the first character we mete, and one of the most memorable. The love Rebeca and Amaranta both feel towards Pietro Crespi that strains their relationship. Rebeca being Pietro’s love until she sees Jose Arcadio and marries him out of passion. Amaranta loving Pietro Crespi but selfishly refusing to accept his marriage proposal, which ultimately sends him to his death. Jose Arcadio pining for a forbidden love and is then murdered in a bath by people he had cared for. All the way up to Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano, every Buendia family member is real. And for Garcia Marquez to make all of them real, to make them all three dimensional, to make the reader care about them all, that takes a brilliant talent for writing.
Many passages of this novel I wrote down to remember, and several of my favorites are at the end. All of them have to do with memory, nostalgia, the past, solitude. The first one is Fernanda :
“She had simply turned the royal regalia into a device for her memory. The first time that she put it on she could not help a knot from forming in her heart and her eyes filling with tears because at that moment she smelled once more the odor of shoe polish on the boots of the officer who came to get her at her house to make her a queen, and her soul brightened with the nostalgia of lost dreams. She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk, and even the bestial nature of the parvenus. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.” (363)
The second is between Aureliano and Jose Arcadio:
“That drawing closer together of two solitary people of the same blood was far from friendship, but it did allow them both to bear up better under the unfathomable solitude that separated and united them at the same time.” (373)
The wise Catalonian has some beautiful words to say:
“One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, the shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” (403)
The last is a realization by Aureliano Buendia:
“…and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. Wounded by the fatal lances of his own nostalgia and that of others, he admired the persistence of the spiderwebs on the dead rosebushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn.” (414)
These quotes capture the overall feeling of the last several chapters.
While I’m not an expert in literature yet, I think it’s appropriate to say that Gabriel Garcia Marquez perfectly and beautifully captures one hundred years worth of family history.
Margie: Thank you for this post. You eloquently articulated many of my responses to this novel, especially the fact that for all of its fantastic machinations, this is in the end a novel of family dynamics in all their wondrous, murderous, convoluted complexity. Now you will have to read his second-greatest novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, also appropriate for this remarkable and strange time.
Maybe this story captures family so lovely because the culture of Colombia is so much closer, neighbors are considered family and friends. I agree with you when you explain your thought about the possibility of him writing so intently because the culture he writes through is so historical. I would then even attempt to expand and say that the cycle of names in the story are actually seen in Spanish culture, so each name hold a rich history.