YOU EMERGE FROM this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendía family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is also a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendías (inventors, artisans, soldiers, lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride a biological tragi-cycle from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.
Which isn’t to say that the book is grimly programmatic. It is often wildly funny, and superbly translated by Gregory Rabassa. Nor does the specific get buried under the symbolic. Macondo with its rains, ghosts, priests, Indians, Arabs, and gypsies is splendidly evoked. So richly realized are the Buendías that they invite comparison with Karamazovs and Sartorises. Indeed, specificity overwhelms incredulity, setting up the reader for imagist explosions more persuasive than mere data can ever be: Anything goes, and everything comes back.
Would you believe, for instance, men with machetes in search of the sea, hacking their way through “bloody lilies and golden salamanders” to find in a swamp a Spanish galleon? A plague of insomnia? A stream of blood feeling its path across a city from a dying son to a grieving mother? A mule that eats sheets, rugs, bedspreads, drapes, and “the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed”? A Sanskrit manuscript predicting the hundred years of Macondo, down to the very deciphering of the prediction by the last Buendía? A paterfamilias chained to a tree in the garden, muttering in Latin? Or, when that paterfamilias finally dies, this consequence:
A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outside. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.
I believe—in the last Buendía infant born as prophesied with the tail of a pig, and eaten alive by ants. In the brothel with alligators. In the three thousand dead strikers against the banana plantation, hauled away by silent train; and Remedios the Beauty, plucked up by the wind and flown to God as she hung up bedsheets to dry; and Melquiades, who introduces Macondo to the miracle of ice. I believe in all the Buendías, from the original José Arcadio and the original Ursula (cousins who marry and by mythic mitosis divide into generations of Arcadios and Aurelianos and Armarantas) down through “the most intricate labyrinths of blood” to the end of the family line in a room full of chamber pots in “the city of mirrors (or mirages)” as the wind comes to sweep away all memory.
Family chronicle, then, and political tour de force, and metaphysical romp, and, intentionally, a cathedral of words, perceptions, and details that amounts to the declaration of a state of mind: solitude being one’s admission of one’s own mortality and one’s discovery that that terrible apprehension is itself mortal, dies with you, must be rediscovered and forgotten again, endlessly. With a single bound. Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either. Don’t miss this one.