One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Point of Myth?

I suppose if your taste runs to JRR Tolkien and Carlos Castaneda this would be a book for you. But mine doesn’t and this isn’t. I prefer James Joyce and Carl Jung. I understand Marquez’s metaphorical recapitulation of the history of Latin America, his articulation of the repetitiveness of human folly over generations, his recognition of the dangers of human inquiry and technological progress, his appreciation of the dialectical quality of things like ambition, masculine strength, sex, and family life. But I am still left unimpressed and unaffected by the result.

For me the various Jose Arcadia Buendia’s and their homophonic relatives are like Hobbits. They operate in the world in a permanent state of awed surprise - slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. They lack the ability for introspective reflection and so bumble from one crisis to the next but never confront the inimical content of themselves with any awareness. They'd rather be at home but only when they're away from it. Consequently there is no tension of development, of discovery, but merely the flatness of yet another unnecessary familial trial that leads nowhere except to further obsession and avoidable grief. After all, at least Joyce’s Bloom and Homer’s Ulysses have moments of personal insight or revelation. In contrast, Marquez’s JAB’s seem obstinately obtuse.

Like any other parabolic myth, One Hundred Years satisfies many interpretations, even contradictory ones: the world of the inquiring intellect vs. the world of the participative human being; personal ambition vs. communal duty; power and its conceits; the sources of tribal identity, etc. But for me these possibilities don’t lead to anything more meaningful than the opportunity presented by a telephone book to ring up any number of strangers. I find nothing ‘larger’ to which such things point. The various JAB’s are fatally fascinated solely by what presents itself in front of them. I think I would prefer the story of Marquez’s gypsy seer, Melquiades, who had “an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things.” But Marquez doesn’t say anything else about what that might be.

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