One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Readers remember this book for its fanciful impossibilities. Yet Marquez starts with the exact opposite—tapping the unexpected power to delight of the commonplace. When the sagacious gypsy Melquíades (based on Borges, some have suggested) arrives in Macondo, he mesmerizes José Arcadio Buendía with everyday items: magnets, false teeth, a telescope. The reader discovers the secret fascination of the familiar—what a wonderful notion!— culminating in Buendía bringing his sons to witness the “greatest invention of our time,” in his opinion. What he at first believes is a diamond of immense size, is actually something even more remarkable: a huge block of ice.
When the gypsies who displayed the ice return with a flying carpet on a follow-up trip, charging the residents for a quick flight over the village of Macondo, we have crossed over into a different realm of existence. As the story develops, the fantastic rubs shoulders with the quotidian, creating that piquant mixture that has come to define magical realism. We encounter Father Nicanor Reyna who can levitate six inches off the ground (with the help of a cup of steaming chocolate), or Remedios the Beauty, who is carried off into the sky, while in the midst of folding a sheet, sort of a cross between the assumption of the Virgin Mary and Sally Field’s antics in The Flying Nun .
Yet miraculous incidents figure only sporadically in the book, although they stand out in the reader’s mind for the very outlandishness. Although One Hundred Years of Solitude is seen as the quintessential work of so-called “magical realism,” Marquez is actually quite sparing in his reliance on the impossible—in comparison with, say, a Harry Potter novel, in which almost every twist in the plot involves some sort of conjuring. But don’t assume that reducing the dose of magic in “magical realism” leads to a comparable increase in the realism. Marquez has dozens of ways of making his book seem fanciful and implausible without relying on out-and-out impossibilities. He is the master of odd coincidences, eccentric tics, implausible events, superstitious quirks, proffered fabrications, strange word-of-mouth accounts, unlikely reactions, and all the other outside-the-normal-bell- curve-distribution events that distinguish life in the village of Macondo. Not since Robert Ripley has there been a writer better situated to tell his readers: Believe It or Not!
Indeed, this book reveals, more than almost any other recent work of literature, the richness of conceptual fiction. Marquez understands that tinkering with his readers’ received notions about reality does not always require people flying on magic carpets, and various other literary equivalents of what movie makers call “special effects.” A device as simple as the unreliable narrator or (as in Marquez) the overly credulous character can exert an even more powerful alchemy over a story than an army of wizards on the march.
This novel also demonstrates that these fanciful reconfigurations of the warp and woof of fictional reality can coexist with deadly serious themes and a sensitivity to the facts of history. For, odd as it may seem, One Hundred Years of Solitude is also a historical novel. Even the meticulous family tree that intimidates the readers at the outset, with its cacophony of similar names, makes clear that this is no work of idle entertainment for the bookish. The civil wars and labor unrest presented in the book echo real events in the history of Colombia. And the emotional center of Marquez’s novel is his fictional recreation of the infamous “banana massacre” of 1928, during which two thousand workers were killed by the army in response to labor unrest. Strikers had been demanding concessions from the United Fruit Company (eventually merged into the corporation that became today’s Chiquita Brands), and the resulting bloodbath stands out as one of the darkest moments in the history of multinational involvement in Latin America. The “magical” disappearance of the strikers in Marquez’s novel, along with the evidence of their massacre, is one distortion of reality that the reader knows all to well how to interpret.
If you asked a hundred other writers to tell this story and the encapsulating history of Colombia in a novel, most of them—in fact, perhaps all of them—would create dark, serious works of fiction. Only Marquez finds a way to combine the tragic and fanciful, the historical and the magical, the larger truth and the countless ways in which truth is abrogated. This has brought him a rapt audience, one that holds on to his every word, that his more sober counterparts would never attract. In short, Marquez is that rarest of storyteller: the one who exposes the frailty of his own story, yet somehow makes it all the more persuasive for this very vulnerability.