One Hundred Years of Solitude

422 pp. 8vo. The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, Jose Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano Jose, Aureliano Segundo, and Jose Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Ursulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of Garcia Marquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom Jose Arcadio Buendia has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buendia's wife, Ursula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."