Mar
14
Cien años de soledad – Round 3
Posted by: | March 14, 2010 | Comments Off on Cien años de soledad – Round 3
After a third sitting and a few lectures to demonstrate the prominent theme of solitude in Cien anos de soledad, its tough to maintain optimism. No happy ending in sight, I would gander. Its exhausting. Marquez seems to toy with customary literary themes of platonic love and carpe diem, introducing his own style and then choking the characters with solitude. No, this is quite unlike the more classic literature works, for example most of the pieces we read in SPAN 365 like El Cid in which a hero rises to a challenge, wins the girl, all is put right in the world and everyone parties till the final word at an epic wedding. Having had these ideas glorified and re-worked, re-branded and re-shoved down our throats by pop-culture and Hollywood in oh so many shapes and forms, Cien anos de soledad makes for a change like shoving your head in an icy vat of water. While we may be conditioned and expectant of happy endings, weddings, romantic love and free will, and while we may hope and expect these elements in the novel, it fails to deliver .This novel is more like how my father guesses most movies (and LOST) end: “everyone dies in the end.” It is an anti-climactic unconventional novel that isn’t thrilling, isn’t your conventional page-turner, and (so far) doesn’t leave you hoping for that happy ending. It is the Oscar winning No Country for Old Men of critically acclaimed great novels: compared to another recent winnerSlumdog Millionaire (much more classic in its themes and happy ending), Cien anos de Soledad is not gratifying, not glorious; it is one of those movies you walk out of stunned, slightly impressed, but leave confused and let down. However comical and optimistic it may seem at the beginning, the novel quickly swats away any notion of joyousness; each character has their own fate, his or her own set course and we are the audience. We watch as they grow only so close to others until succumbing to their own unique form of solitude. After seeing it repeat generation after generation, the reader is exhausted by seeing one character after another drowning in their own world, shut from connection others and closed from the world. I’m now wondering, what’s left on the horizon? How will the novel end? At this point I’m going to slip into my own world of solitude, shut from the world and wallowing in my own loneliness until we finish the book and I can get back to Kerouac and wishing I was traveling.
Maybe it is just something conditioned by our culture, an expectancy that something good will happen, an unrealistic optimism, that keeps me waiting and wanting someone to ‘win’, to triumph and not be left alone in the end. So far, things are looking grim. But hey, one can hope.
