Yüzyıllık Yalnızlık (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

Careful: this gives away how the book ends.

The names drove me mad. Let me say that from the start.

Why they drove me mad

The Buendía family spans six generations and almost everyone has the same name.

There are the José Arcadios: the founder, his son, his grandson, his grandson's son. There are the Aurelianos, seventeen of them with the same name. There are three Remedios. Two Amarantas, then Amaranta Úrsula.

In the first hundred pages I looked at the family tree at the front of the book so many times that instead of reading I was solving a puzzle.

Then I stopped. I decided not to tell exactly who was who.

The book opened up at that moment.

Because the confusion is the subject itself

Over six generations the family repeats the same mistakes.

The same obsessions: one shuts himself away with alchemy, and so does his grandson. The same wrong loves: within the family, impossible, destructive. The same wars. The same solitude.

The grandson unknowingly does again what the man one generation before him did. Nobody really knows the one before, because nobody remembers.

So let the names get mixed up. They are supposed to.

When I understood this my reading speed doubled and the book stopped being a hard book.

Macondo

The town is founded by José Arcadio Buendía: in a swamp, in a place close to nowhere.

The book goes from the founding of the town to its disappearance, and in between the whole history of a country passes: the arrival of gypsy traders, the founding of the church, civil wars, the train, the banana company, the strike, the massacre, the rain, the drought.

The banana company massacre is the harshest part of the book and is based on a real event: the killing of United Fruit workers in Colombia in 1928.

In the book three thousand people are killed, the bodies are carried away by train, and the next day everyone says nothing like that happened. The only witness is considered mad.

This part is not magical. It is the most realistic and the most frightening.

Where the solitude comes from

The Buendías are all lonely but this solitude does not come from outside. Nobody excludes them, nobody abandons them.

Each shuts himself into his own obsession. One into a laboratory, one into war, one into making little gold fishes in a room, one into deciphering parchments.

Colonel Aureliano starts thirty-two wars, loses all of them, then shuts himself in a room and makes small golden fishes. He sells the fishes he makes, makes new fishes with the money, melts them and makes them again. Forever.

There are people around them, the house is full, the town is crowded. Nobody reaches anybody.

Reading this, I thought about my own periods

Shutting yourself into something and not coming out for hours. Everyone around quietly moving away in the meantime. Then when you come out nobody is there, and not understanding why.

Hyperfocus is usually described as a talent: look, you can work for hours.

García Márquez wrote it as a form of solitude, and I think that is the more honest one. The Colonel's fishes are a very productive pastime; they are of no use at all and they do not get him out of the room.

Úrsula

The real center of the book and its least discussed character.

The founder's wife. She lives to the age of a hundred and twenty, goes blind and tells no one she is blind, running the order of the house from memory.

While all the men chase an obsession, she is the one who keeps the house standing. She makes candy animals and sells them, expands the house, sees to the funerals, raises the grandchildren.

Nobody thanks her. The book does not bring her forward either.

For what we call invisible work, I think this character is the best literary description.

The magical parts

They never gave me trouble, quite the opposite.

A woman rises into the sky while folding sheets and nobody is surprised. The rain lasts four years, eleven months and two days. The dead come home and sit down. When a man dies, his blood runs through the streets to his mother's kitchen.

A book that does not try to explain these seemed more believable to me than a book that does. Nobody asks "how did this happen," so the reader does not ask either.

García Márquez says he learned this from his grandmother: she told extraordinary things without ever changing her voice.

The ending

The last Aureliano deciphers the parchments a gypsy left a hundred years ago.

The whole history of the family is written in the parchments: what he reads is the very book he is reading. When he reaches the last line, a wind wipes the town away.

When I closed it I sat for a while. Something that rarely happens.

One practical note

Do not look at the family tree.

The opposite of this advice is written everywhere. This is what worked for me, and it was the only thing that stopped me from giving up the book.

It is around four hundred pages. The first hundred pages are the slowest.