100 Years of Solitude...

More months ago than I would like to admit I was finishing Dave Eggers' brilliant What Is the What and found myself unsure of what I wanted to read next. At some point, however, I decided that I wanted to fall back into the way I felt when reading Camus or Dostoevsky or some of the more serious Vonnegut, but I was again stuck with where to go. The last time this happened, I tried to read Catch 22, but that just didn't fly at all... I still don't know why... C'est la vie.

So I perused the internet for a while and tried to think of things I'd passed over in the past; eventually I stumbled upon 100 Years of Solitude over on Eliza's myspace page. Not too much time had passed since I had seen (and loved) Pan's Labyrinth and The Motorcycle Diaries, but despite having some erroneous perception of a connection between Italo Calvino and South America, I don't think I'd actually read anything from that part of the world. Once the little brown B&N box arrived at work, I immediately cracked the thing open and dove in. The book opens with an anecdote about the first time one of the characters saw an ice cube. Which, in itself, isn't necessarily that fascinating, but the night before I had read a different account of the exact same situation in What Is the What. Which was strange. Both images of fascination with something seemingly so simple painted a brilliant picture of innocence, and the opening story framed within the flashback ("Many year later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.") also perfectly framed the rest of the story. Forgive me... I'm reading again after looking up that quote. This also reminded/reminds me of Calvino's sign story from Cosmicomics: "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." I don't know if it was the tone or the rhythm or something else entirely, but despite the innocent and almost playful word choices describing this newly awakened culture, there was an undercurrent of disaster from page 1. I knew something was going to get fucked up. I knew something was going to be beautiful, and then it would be gone. But I continued reading. With no small about of trepidation as I was afraid this was going to turn into one of those books about loving families happy togetherness or something else that I just didn't quite grasp making it through the turmoil hinted at from the beginning. Thankfully I was wrong. This book really was about solitude. In lots of different ways. Many that, I'm sure, I don't understand yet and many that, I'm sure, I read into unintentional existence. Lest I posture as a knowledgeable reviewer, I'd better hop back to my own experience. This book was really hard for me to read. The lack of a linear chronology really messed with my head. I like things to have a place. And I like for them to be there. The storyline suffered as a story "line," but now, in retrospect, I think I can see the novel as having been very episodic. Which makes me happy. (more on that later) I also had a lot of trouble with the names. With foreign names, I often just read over them... there's a sound in my head that means a certain character, and that works. But, here, the names were all so incredibly similar to (if not exactly the same as) the names of other characters in the book, I quickly lost hold on who was who within the Buendia family. Which, really, is a shortcoming of my own, but still caused me some difficulty. I was trying so hard to put all of the pieces together as I read that I could rarely finish more than one chapter in a sitting. I felt utterly defeated by the world into which I was immersing myself, and it took its toll on me. For weeks at a time, the book would languish in the back seat of my car, on the coffee table, or tucked inside my computer bag. On more than one occasion I was inches away from giving up. I managed to push through... all the while holding onto my meekly backed assertions that this book was just crazy. Obviously I wasn't smart enough to get it, or this guy was just freaking nuts. (And I'm smart.......) I had gathered little to back up or change my world views, and I felt little to no emotional attachment to the characters. No one spilt their heart onto the page - almost everyone was portrayed from the outside, which made it very difficult to feel an empathetic bond. But as I closed in on the 50-pages-until-the-end mark, I became excited again. The story began to reveal itself, as did the characters. The language used to describe the states-of-being was beautiful, and it spoke to me. Finally, I connected with Ursula, and I felt her pain in me. "She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst." That's the first sentence I underlined through over 360 pages... and a few sentences later, I understood more clearly: "The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude." I almost found my own emotions at that point. Sadly, the thing that really hit it for me showed up less than a score of pages from the end. The formerly vibrant and knowledgeable bookseller inserts himself into the story one last time in an effort to undo all he had done before. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that the forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. Ouch. In many ways, I did not want to hear that. But in many ways, that is exactly what I was looking for. At the very least, he allows love to exist. He gives it a name. But then casts it down lowering its status to nothing more than, can I say it, dust in the wind. Oh, and I bought it. My pathetic sense of reality has had a need to let those ideas be truth. But what I really wanted to do was grab him by the throat and shake him until his broken heart found its missing pieces again. Yes, love is fleeting. But only insofar as life is fleeting. Everything exists only under the eye of the observer, and my love can only exist so long as I am here to feel it. Love can be and should be eternal within a lifetime, and those words on the page shoved a million tiny pins through my heart when I didn't immediately find that our bookseller had grown to be an ignorant ass. But it brought me back to myself too. This was the most poignant moment in the book for me; it really made me think about, you know, "stuff" instead of just trying to figure out the story. Bravo! So what is left? The feeling... the prophecy... set forth from the beginning was coming to pass. The beautiful dream of Macondo was becoming nothing but a ravished piece of earth. The wind whipped down the streets, and the last of the Buendia line raged against the forces set against him before he was conceived. So I thought, "This is Shakespeare... this is Dallas... this is True Romance... let's pile the bodies and get this over with." Then... on the last page, something changed. In just the blink of an eye, I understood what was happening. I understood what had happened, and I understood why it had to happen the way it did. Gabriel Garcia Marquez went from "overrated curiosity" to "absolute genius!" I can't even attempt to write what happened, but it is irrelevant. What matters is, I think, what it did to me, and I am so grateful that I didn't give up on this. That last moment of, "A-ha, mother fucker!" was worth it, and it made every other experience of reading the book ten times more meaningful. Of course, we're all solitary to some extent. At the very least, we all die alone, and can you ever truly completely share a feeling? So we all live in solitude, but there are others of us who choose that solitude. And choose to embrace, expand, and deify solitude. And we are the ones who go absolutely completely insane. No man is an island. Jon Bon Jovi said that. Last thing, then I'm out... Apparently GGM was a friend of Mr. Castro. He was only allowed to visit the United States on a limited Visa even after winning the Noble Prize for Literature. Americans sure are stuck in their ways. The ban, according to what I've found online, was finally lifted in the late 1990's by Bill Clinton. Also, I stole all of these pictures and got some of my external information from this website