Magical Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Recently I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the most famous work by 1982 Nobel Prize Winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book details the ascent and descent of the Buendía family over seven generations, and one hundred years, in the fictional town of Macondo. To be honest, this is probably the most intriguing book I’ve read in a long time. The book is extremely fast-paced, has a large amount of characters, and combines fantastic elements with elements of realistic fiction.

One of the many things that makes this book strange is the way that it is structured. This book does not start off immediately from the beginning of time; instead it starts with the most intriguing opening line ever: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” After that, the book goes on to detail the founding of Macondo and continues until the end of the novel. Even though these events are in the past, Garcia Marquez tells the history of the family. Although the majority of the book takes place in the past, everything that happens is a shock to the reader because of how the story  is told. The book later on in the novel, also jumps between time periods rather than telling the story strictly chronologically. 

Another point I’d like to touch on, which is most frequently brought up whenever people discuss this book, or Garcia Marquez in general is the genre of magical realism. This book has a mostly realistic view of the world, with fantastical elements scattered throughout, as opposed to a book that is strictly fantasy, or strictly realistic fiction. The best example of this is the banana workers massacre. In the 20th century, the United Fruit Company forcibly took control of many South American countries through the use of mercenaries. In 1928 in Ciénaga, Columbia, workers demanded better working conditions from the United Fruit Company. They went on strike refusing to work when their demands were not granted, and it resulted in the massacre of an unknown number of people in the town. Garcia Marquez experienced this massacre firsthand as a young boy living in the town where the massacre happened.. This same event takes place in the novel, in the fictional of Macondo, this same event takes place. However, Garcia Marquez fictionalizes this event, including fictional accounts of the massacre through the perspective of the main characters in the novel. Historical events like these are intertwined with characters who can levitate, characters who can tell the future, characters who can change their size at will, and a man who comes back from the dead, dies, reappears as a ghost and writes prophetic messages in Sanskrit. This, along with the non-linear fast-paced narrative, and a humongous cast of characters, makes One Hundred Years of Solitude a unique literary experience, that would be very hard to find anywhere else.

Overall I would recommend One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a rapidly moving book with an intriguing plot that anyone that enjoy reading, that will make you feel happy, sad, and angry. My only complaint would be that a bunch of characters are named the same and it contains its fair share of incest.