It’s a rare sort of book that burrows boll weevil-like into your heart, laying its eggs in the soft cotton folds of your aortic and ventricular tissues to hatch into dizzying swarms of wonder and nostalgia. The feelings elicited by said book can consume you, even make you a little unhinged. I feel I can say with only the slightest tinge of discomfiture that this is what happened when I read “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
This book had been on my “To-Read” list for quite some time. It was sitting on my roommate’s bookshelf, an outdated paperback relic squished between a phalanx of hardcover popular novels, staring out at me with the mad, zealous eyes of Colonial Aureliano Buendia. I decided I’d take it with me to Costa Rica and hopefully find the time to read it. Four days into the trip, I read the last words of the book to the soft crackling of the candles melting their wax upon the stone patio. I was awed. I had never experienced anything before like what Marquez put to paper (and what Gregory Rabassa so eloquently translated). The closest thing I could possibly compare it to in my literary experience was John Crowley’s “Little, Big,” another one of my favorites.
The most striking impression that I was left with after reading “One Hundred Years…” was how each character affected his or her world by what they wanted to see in it. In a way, Macondo was a blank canvas which the Buendia family could paint in whatever color or style they wanted. Magic coexisted with science, the grotesquely absurd stood shoulder to shoulder with the strictest degree of rationalism. All things were highly mutable, a fact which was particularly evident to me as a reader but which the characters of the book were unaware of. This was due to how Marquez told the story, aging characters at a near breakneck pace. Every page seemed tinged with melancholy because of how quickly the children and whatever happiness they experienced grew old, withered and inevitably died.
I look forward to delving into the rest of Marquez’s catalogue. Hopefully doing so will give me an extra impetus to learn more Spanish.
Jared Rinaldi 