Books this year: a book diary

One Hundred Years of Solitude has one of the best opening lines of any novel, ever: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Though you don’t realize it until you’re lost somewhere in the middle of the novel, that line contains hints of most of the major themes of the book: war, memory, a maddeningly unspecific chronology, solitude (he is, after all, facing the firing squad alone), loss, death, and the discovery of the wonders of the larger world.

Of course, a great opener does not a great novel make, but this is indeed a great novel. It’s set in Colombia, though the country’s name is never mentioned, in the fictional town of Macondo. When the novel is set is a trickier question, because of Marquez’s chronological reticence, but the founding of Macondo probably occured sometime around 1860, based on my guess at the Colonel’s age at the beginning of the Thousand Days War.

Marquez’s handling of time is one of the beautiful things about this book. He makes frequent reference to the month or day of the week when something happened, but he never mentions the year. He is never specific about how long a state of affairs endures, beyond “years” or “many years.” He likewise never tells us how old any of the characters are, with a few exceptions: the approximate ages of children are given, sometimes, and the ages of a few old women are given, but with a margin of error of at least a decade. That lack of a detailed chronology is only the beginning, however. Marquez constantly looks to the future and to the past, so much so that one is not always sure if the character he’s just killed off is actually dead yet, or just going to die sometime in the next fifty pages.

The firing squad is an excellent example of this. The “[some amount of time] later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia …” construction occurs half a dozen times (or more) before he actually faces the firing squad nearly halfway through the book, and it’s remembered several times after that, by various characters. Also, several of his kinsmen also face firing squads at various times, and each actual facing is preceded by at least one of the “[some amount of time] later” statements.

Another recurring theme of the novel is the re-occurrence of events, names, relationships, and characters. Characters re-occur in several ways: the Aurelianos tend to have the personality traits, as do the Jose Arcadios; Melquiades and Pilar Ternera have similar relationships with the Buendia men all down the line; and the dead never really go away.

There is no good answer to the question “what is it about?,” but a stab at one might be: the decline and fall of the Buendia line. The feeling that catastrophe is hanging over them grows slowly, imperceptibly at first, but it becomes increasingly oppressive as time passes. The prose changes colors from bright and enchanting to stark and haunting, and the final pages are a terrifying revelation, at least to the last of the Buendias. The novel ends with a line as good as the one it began with: “…races condemned to one hundred years of solitude [do] not get a second chance on earth.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Books Chris has read, 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.