One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez (translated by
Gregory Rabassa)
he opening sentence of this book fi xes itself in your memory:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliana Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when
his father took him. . . .” Compelling, yes? Now let’s add the last three
words: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliana
Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took
him to discover ice.” To discover ice! We’re in another realm. Márquez,
author-as-god, is here creating the world of Macondo, which is in some
ways lifelike (Márquez says it’s based on villages of his childhood in
Colombia) and some ways emphatically not.
Some reader is muttering “magical realism.” This phrase—which,
I’m told, Márquez avoids—was devised and abandoned by a German
critic of post-expressionist art; its contrasting words boldly proclaim it
an oxymoron, a cohabitation of the fantastic and the real. Shakespeare
used the combination more than four hundred years ago with the ghost
in Hamlet; Homer used it more than fifteen hundred years ago in the
Iliad when Achilles’ horses talk to him. Nonetheless, the phrase has
gained a certain cachet when it’s used for Latin American literature,
and this truly transcultural novel is the most popular example. Not
only has this novel made Márquez a multimillionaire; it helped bring
him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. (His acceptance speech
stressed that the “real” Latin America has always been a source of the
“fantastic,” citing a Florentine explorer’s descriptions of birds without
feet, pigs with navels on their backs.)
The novel serenely convinces you of this supercharged alternate
cosmos. The world has been made anew, and a band of gypsies led by
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June