"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,

One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those great books that's really about everything. Incredible pain lives alongside ecstasy, the pendulum of fortune swings back and forth, there's war and obsession and family and faith. It appears at first as a fantastical tale, but somehow transforms into a monument capturing the breath of humanity in an odd, poetic way. 

 

At points the novel feels like a series of fables. Magic is part of it all (see last post); many of the situations described are so absurd they require a second take. 

 

The non-linear storyline follows the Buendía family, a cursed, larger-than-life, dysfunctional group where everyone shares the same few names and traits with their predecessors. The Aureliano's act one way, the José Arcadio's another, the Remedios' their own. It's hard to keep track of which character did what and where their spot on the family tree is (conveniently drawn on the first page). But it becomes clear that this confusion is intentional.

Gabriel García Márquez distorts time and its forward flow, showing beginnings and ends as not-so concrete, the barriers between past and present and future not so impenetrable. The memories of time gone slosh around in the muck of daily life. 

 

The world turns round and round in cycles. The characters tread the same paths their ancestors did because what are we if not combinations of those that came before. The way this vast, epic story is told is equally beautiful and scary and raw. 

The first sentence sets the tone. 

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

 

It's so famous because time is all jumbled up--as if what will happen is already known the same as what has happened before is. The sentence starts in the future, jumps to that present, then returns to the past in one fell swoop. This continues to happen throughout the rest of the powerful, devastating book. 

It isn't a disheartening tale, though. Wonder is far too central to it. I recently learned that demographers estimate more than 100 billion humans have lived on the planet--I get the same feeling from knowing that, trying to wrap my mind around it, as I do from One Hundred Years of Solitude. It makes me imagine myself in a much larger and intertwined system that fundamentally characterizes my life.

Time is fickle and strange in the world Márquez created, just like it is in the world he physically inhabited. A story like this gives perspective to how unfathomable and astonishing is life as we know it. 

A final thing. I came across a video of this Canadian dude singing from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian. The passage he recites is about the olden times, the countless days before. The distant past when things began. 

 

To think that one of the first pieces of literature and music, ancient by our standards, pays homage to the immense amount of time that has passed is amazing. Time seems to have always been a mysterious shadow drawing our attention. The grand questions that pester us today have been asked and pondered for longer than we can possibly know.