The first half of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was a vibrant and overwhelming ride. It felt as if the narrative spun into chaos within the first 30 pages. It was beautiful to experience but also disorienting and somewhat tedious. Like the title suggests, and as Jon mentioned in his lecture, the greatest enemy of the characters (and the readers) here is tedium. A slow-boiling circus of chaotic personalities and circumstances that never seems to progress past its repeated mistakes.

Given the nature of magical realism and also the events of this novel, I found it difficult to differentiate the momentous from the mundane. Metaphorically speaking, García Márquez’s writing was extremely saturated and rich – it felt like a deluge of vivid colors – and hence, at times I wanted to put on sunglasses to mitigate the blinding intensity. Even the syntax of García Márquez’s writing seemed to contribute to this flood of imagery. He crafts his narrative through large blocks of text in which context, points of view, and time periods can fluctuate without apparent connection. Even dialogue would sometimes be buried in these long paragraphs, giving the reader a choppy sense of organization and progression. As I settled into the book, I began to acclimate to García Márquez’s game and found myself getting used to finding profound passages embedded in seemingly unrelated text – for example, “Amaranta’s sensibility, her discreet but enveloping tenderness had been weaving an invisible web about her fiancé, which he had to push aside materially with his pale and ringless fingers in order to leave the house at eight o’clock” (107). Breathtaking passages like these felt like were difficult to identify and ruminate on because they were often sandwiched by an excess of equally intense descriptions and events.

One thing I loved in particular about the text was the absurd humor, planted dryly at unexpected moments. There are too many instances to mention, but this one in particular truly made me laugh out loud: “He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians” (71). Moments like this especially stuck out because their simple and blunt delivery stood in contrast to adjacent passages of serious intensity.

Disney’s Encanto popped into my head repeatedly in the first half of the novel. Upon further research I found that I’m definitely not the first to make this connection and many believe that One Hundred Years of Solitude may have been a significant (or entire) source of inspiration for La Familia Madrigal. Both the Buendía and Madrigal families live in massive, multi-generational mansions in the jungle of Colombia, acting as the social and political leaders of their village, and juggling surreal and magical powers. I loved thinking about this possible connection as the novel progressed; it helped to lighten some of the darker aspects of the plot.

Question for discussion: How did you make sense of time in the novel? At times it felt like the narrative crawled along at snail’s pace and then sped into overdrive skipping across decades. I could never get a sense of the children’s ages or relationships to each other. Do you think time is also subject to the magic of Macondo?