Sunday book pick: ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is a novel you dream, not read

A few days ago, when I was 30 pages away from finishing the book, I told my friend that Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude does not require you to be fully “aware” of what you are reading – you are allowed to slip into dreams, to let the words wash over you. The author is in complete control of his creation but as a reader, you can dip in and out of consciousness as you follow the Buendía family through seven generations of births, deaths, and other such occurrences.

A supernatural echo

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, it is one of those novels that indeed needs no introduction. Often hailed as the greatest novel of the twentieth century, One Hundred Years of Solitude – published in Spanish in 1967, and in Gregory Rabassa’s incomparable English translation in 1970 – takes the family drama out of the living room and projects it as a town’s history. Jose Arcadio Buendía dreamt of a “city of mirrors that reflect the world in and about it” and founded Macondo by the riverside – a town that would soon become synonymous with the Buendía family. A name that had “no meaning at all” and only a “supernatural echo.” Its exceptional nature is proven in the town’s first human birth – the baby was born silent after having already cried in his mother’s womb.

Keeping the memory of his extraordinary birth intact, Aureliano insists he be addressed as Colonel. To honour this title, he starts thirty-two armed uprisings (and loses them all) and survives fourteen attempts on his life. He fathers seventeen male children from seventeen different women from sexual relations both impulsive and incestuous in nature. The sisters, cousins, and aunts hesitate initially before giving in. You are not expected to keep track of what all of these seventeen boys and their mothers are up to, and you don’t have to. Meanwhile, the central Buendía man gets up to fights, revolutions, and counter-revolutions. Occurances such as babies born with tails, ghost sightings, or women levitating do not warrant any excitement here – this is life in Macondo.

The town has virtually no contact with the outside world besides the band of gypsies that turns up annually bearing wonderful things such as ice, magnets, and telescopes.

The iconic opening line about discovering ice suddenly makes sense:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Jose Arcadio Buendía does trade with the gypsies enthusiastically, paying them whatever they demand. He’s got the heart of a scientist, though a mind…not so much. The one who suffers the worst from his delusions is his wife Úrsula, who has no choice but to put up with him – she keeps the clan alive and fed as her husband slips further into insanity.

The one voice that remains steadfast throughout is Úrsula’s. As the matriarch, she watches on as the Buendía men make foolish, selfish decisions generation after generation. She has been blessed – cursed – with a very long life, death does not come in time to relieve her from witnessing the disintegration of the family. When the end comes for the Buendías, it’s the men who are to blame for it – the women have (discreetly) cleaned up their mess to the best of their abilities.

The finer details

Wars and governments are bad, many inventions have resulted in strife, revolutionaries often betray their own beliefs, but it is indiscriminate lust and sex that are most notorious. The inbreeding and incest have made the dreams and lives of the Buendías circular – the names repeat themselves, and so do the tragedies that befall them. While the family worries about babies being born with tails, they seem to forget that the madness and anger and discontent travel in circles too.

The advent of cinema and light bulbs brings much excitement to residents of Macondo, but for the Buendías life goes on as usual as eccentricities become more frequent and varied as more members are added to the family. There’s a particularly funny passage about man’s historic preoccupation with exterminating cockroaches – and the Buendías cannot escape these pests either.

Like all good things, the story of Macondo also comes to an end. The Buendía family falls into ruins and, by extension, so does the town. The virile, valiant men cannot prevent the doom – a wind quite literally “wipes” away the town and “exiles” it from people’s memories.

Often hailed as the father of the magical realism genre, Garcia Márquez’s novel is perhaps outlandish only in its outer details. Here, time is circular – what goes round comes around. But the finer details hover close to reality as the Buendías fight, argue, and try to outsmart each other. The strife within the family finds reflections in the occasional wars and unrest that either the Buendía men stir up or sink their teeth into. By their own admission, it’s easier to start a war than end it, easier to kill your own men than make them see reason.

So, is One Hundred Years of Solitude one of the greatest novels ever written? You can’t entirely understand it, but you would hesitate to disagree. Like a many-layered dream, the novel reveals itself in flashes. You could add your own memories to it, subtract some of the fantasies from it and still what you’d be left with is a complete whole. It sounds impossible and yet the novel allows you to repeat this exercise over and over again.

To reiterate what my friend and I decided, this is not a novel you read, it’s a novel you dream.

Translator Gregory Rabassa’s genius matches Márquez’s. This is barely an exaggeration. If you were to track down the source of the never-ending Garcia Márquez wave in the English-speaking world, it would be him. Rabassa executes the same lightness of touch that Márquez also must have in the Spanish – the magic, the realism, the brilliance spills over into his translation. Like the memory of listening to a master playing the pianoforte in a grand concert hall, the music of Rabassa’s re-creation never leaves your ear. To add to this experience, a Spanish-language series adaptation of the novel is being premiered on Netflix on December 11. The 16-episode show, which will be released in two parts, has been filmed entirely in Colombia.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, Penguin Random House.