Cycle of Life

Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Publication Year: 1967
Rating: A+

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude not only carries the reader through the birth and death of the fictional town of Macondo, but also celebrates the birth and death of the Buendia lineage.

This story is about how history repeats itself, always circling and circling until the end becomes the beginning again. This is a story about the snake that ate its own tail. Fantasy and facts intertwine, painting the walls of the Buendia home in Macondo. The children never know what to believe and what not to believe because the storytellers tell all their stories in the same voice, with the same face, no matter how extravagant. Marquez modeled this mode of storytelling after his own grandparents, who shared with him their own superstitions and family histories.

For over one hundred years, the Buendia family is marked by passion, death and incest. The siblings, aunts and uncles have children, each carrying the names that have been passed down for generations. The names have been passed down for so long that by the time the last children are born and named, their ancestors are only mystical characters. Inhabitants of the town question their ever existing.

When reading this book, one gets the feeling that they’re reading the same story over and over again. The transfer from parent to child on and on of the same Buendia characteristics adds to this sense. But as the family lives on – mostly oblivious to the changes in the outside world – the town of Macondo is changing. From its humble beginnings when it was originally founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia, to its days of prosperity then of war, to its swift ending, the only constant in the town is the Buendia family.

“The history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.” From years of solitude was finally born (as predicted by Ursula – the family’s original mother) the product of incest and passion: The last born child bore a pig’s tail. The axle was worn. The solitary nature of the Buendia family eventually led to its demise. But not without providing many, many years of glorious stories and people, filled with life and color.