There was a town with the breath of fire,
Where women thrust their hips and men would perspire
Where incest was so common, they called it passion
and naming your child Aureliano was the latest fashion
Where ‘Everything is known’ but not your own mother,
The guy next to you might as well be your brother,
Where the dead come alive with warm breaths,
To reveal secrets and warn about coming deaths,
There lives a family called Buendia touched by irrevocable madness,
In a town that reeks of eternal sadness,
Keep trying to connect the dots,
While they shit in their chamberpots,
Now war, now bananas, now rain
Oh! the everlasting and irrefutable pain,
In the town of Macondo, that WAS, now ISN’T and will never BE
For it was wept out forever after tolerating endless Catastrophe,
Completely destroyed, sans wounds, remains or scars,
as towns cursed by One Hundred Years Of Solitude often are.
One doesn’t need to look beyond this book in the quest for ‘Magical realism’. This one book might as well be one of…or THE most well-told story of all time.
Macondo in many ways, belongs to the Buendia family. Not only because they were the founders and took care of the functioning of the town but because it was, at times, their personal utopia and dystopia, and it existed as long as they did. The themes of fate and things coming around in a circle are repetitive and work well with the overall story.
The book gets so freakishly weird at times that one would put it down in shock if it were not for the fantastic air that quietly encircles it. Throughout the incest, the children with pigs, the dead coming to life- my only reaction (perhaps shared by everyone if i am not too preposterous) was OH WELL. WHY NOT.
Of course, the dead would come to life, of course, the animals would reproduce as if someone had fast-forwarded the natural process, and of course, pure, beautiful, crazy women would be elevated to the heavens with their bodies in their lives. Why wouldn’t it? It’s MACON- to the freaking-DO.
What really hit me was the sudden 1984-esque turn that the book briefly took. It was so real and sounded so morbidly commonplace that it scared me. The ‘doublethink’ laced those parts where everyone was convinced that there had never been any problems in Macondo. No revolts, no wars, no Colonel Aureliano Buendia, no revolts, no banana company. Macondo was a ‘happy town’, except the fact that it was not and had never been.
Then there is the issue of the names being repeated so often. Yes, it was rather nerve wracking to figure out which Aureliano, which Arcadio was being talked about but i rather feel that the similar names made it concise. If everyone had different nomenclature with Rodrigos, Gustavs and whatnot, the confusion would have been even more. It was compact to say that the 17 Aurelianos were killed, but yes, it was very annoying.
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