This week was our second and final week reading 100 years of solitude and the second half did not disappoint! This book is filled with so many twists and turns that kept me on my feet throughout the entire book. I absolutely loved reading this book, however, I found the most difficult part while reading was not necessarily the number of characters with the same names (although that was quite confusing) but rather remembering the details of all the events that occurred within the book as there was so much going on at times! Nonetheless, while it wasn’t always the easiest book to follow, the chaos that endured throughout had a profound impact on me, as it made me think and reflect on themes such as fate, lust, repetition, and time.
After watching the lecture video for this week, I was interested in looking further into how One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects real-life events, so for this week’s discussion I looked into its parallels between Latin American history and the fictional story of Macondo. While there are multiple points in the story that parallels with real-life events, the one that stuck out to me the most was the mirroring of the Banana Massacre of 1928. Similar o the event in the book, in 1928 the Columbian military had opened fire and killed a large number of plantation workers who were on strike and protesting for better working conditions. It was really interesting to me that Garcia Marquez decided to use the exact details of the historical event in the book, making it very obvious that this story is not completely fictional, but rather it lies in some truth or reality despite its magical elements. After further research, I found that the Banana Massacre had occurred a year after Garcia Marquez was born, suggesting that he has no recollection of this event as he was a baby. This fact made me wonder about the significance of the events he chose to represent in One Hundred Years of Solitude and how each one may enhance the themes of the story. If you have any thoughts on this, please comment them below!
Overall, I found the way in which this book was written to be very powerful, as it creates a perfect mix of magical elements with real-life themes that can be related to historical events. In my little research and knowledge of the impact of this story globally, however, I wondered whether we may see such themes/events in the book present in more current events or even maybe in our own lives. Because of this, my question for this week is how do you think the themes of “100 Years of Solitude” relate to our world today? What might this say about the society we built?
Yes, the question of the relationship between this book and History (with a capital H, as it were) is a good one. When it comes to the banana massacre, the historical one is now known mostly thanks to the fact that García Márquez put a version of it into this book… so in effect the book carries and perpetuates that historical memory that would otherwise be lost, and that in the book itself is lost. It’s as though the novel were trying to make up for the failures of history.
This novel is an ordered chaos, but the most interesting thing is that History enters with all its drama without having to follow all the events to the letter, like in a school book. There is a sense of oral memories, something that goes beyond written culture (which is very present in the novel). One more of the tensions that structure the book.