Falling In Love with Gabriel García Márquez

(Dear Mr. Coon,

I apologize that this blog is a day late. I'm currently in Virginia, as you may know, to celebrate my mom winning the Alumna of the Year award from the University of Virginia. Since most of yesterday was spent at the university listening to her give speeches and such, I planned to write the blog when I got home last night. Unfortunately, I became really ill in the middle of dinner and ended up going home and sleeping for twelve hours. I won't go into the gross details, but if you need to hear from anyone else, both my mom and Alexis Glascock can attest to my state.

This little blurb was not counted in the final wordcount. And just in case you need a good laugh, please know that I'm leaning halfway out the window, balancing my laptop just to try and steal the neighbor's interent wireless connection so I can post this blog :) Have a good weekend.)

From the moment I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I knew I was going to fall in love. Gabriel García Márquez has absolutely captured me, and to be honest, I’m not even sure how. The book does not really revolve around any character in particular, there is very little dialogue, and the plot jumps around every few pages. Yet somehow, I cannot put this book down. Something about the lineage of the Buendía family, the hopes we share with Úrsula for the future of the family, and the eloquence with which Márquez neatly wraps the book into one complete package keeps any reader absolutely entranced and desperate for more.

When I first wrote about the strength of Úrsula, my favorite character up to that point, I had no idea what a vital role she would play throughout the book. In fact, I was rather upset wondering how many pages she would live through. But Úrsula has lived on, and in fact she “resisted growing old even when she had already lost count of her age” (246). I found myself incredibly impressed with Úrsula throughout the novel, especially when Colonel Aureliano Buendía left young Arcadio in charge of Macondo, and the latter “became the cruelest ruler that Macondo had ever known” (105). Úrsula grew more and more enraged until finally, on the day that Arcadio dragged Don Mascote out into the street with the intention of shooting him, Úrsula ran after him with a pitch-covered whip, until she “chased him to the back of the courtyard where Arcadio curled up like a snail in its shell” (105.) I was so impressed with Úrsula’s fearlessness in this scene; she single-handedly overthrew Macondo’s bloody dictator and took over the rule of the town. Despite how many people Arcadio had had shot just for disrespecting him, he found himself powerless in the face of his grandmother. I also love the way with which Úrsula welcomes all into her home, from Colonel Aureliano’s seventeen children to the young orphan Rebeca to Aureliano Segundo’s ridiculous wife Fernanda del Carpio. If the book has a main character, I believe it is Úrsula, the caretaker of the Buendía lineage and the keeper of the peace in Macondo.

Another striking feature of the novel is the incredible depth of love and tragedy. So many times, we feel hopeful for the lonely characters, hoping that they have finally found love, and oftentimes, it is followed only by tragedy. For example, Amaranta never finds love. She falls for Pietro Crespi, who instead falls in love with her sister, Rebeca. We see the desperate need to love and be loved in Amaranta’s character when she goes so far as to threaten Rebeca with death should she marry Pietro Crespi. When Rebeca becomes disenchanted with Pietro Crespi and instead marries José Arcadio, however, we find hope for Amaranta’s happiness. I will never understand why Amaranta chose to tug Pietro along by a string rather than accept his proposition to marry her. As he showered her with affection and gifts, she continued to turn up her nose until she had driven him to commit suicide. She destroys her own hopes for happiness with a man she had loved so deeply that she was ready to murder for him, and for what? Later in the book, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez seeks her affections, spending hours with Amaranta in the sewing room and bringing her gifts. And yet Amaranta tells him “Let’s forget about each other forever…. We’re too old for this sort of thing now” (163). She clearly has no desire to be alone, being that right after she told the Colonel her final answer, she “locked herself in her bedroom to weep over her solitude unto death” (163). The closest she comes to letting herself love and be loved is her run-in with Aureliano José, a man she had raised from the time he was a little child who fell in love with her and even deserted the army to come back for her. She refuses him, however, and he ends up dying just outside a movie theater, shot by Captain Aquiles Ricardo.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has become an absolute favorite of mine, and I plan to go about reading the rest of Márquez’s work in my spare time. Though I still cannot figure out what it is exactly about this book that has captured my imagination, I’m sure I will reread it many times throughout my life. In fact, I’m actually dreading writing the final paper on the novel, because I have no idea how to encompass everything I love under one thesis statement. (773)

The articles I plan to use are:

Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
Eduardo Posada-Carbo
Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 395-414
Published by: Cambridge University Press
(though it may talk too much about the war the book was based off of and not enough about the book itself)

The Necessity of the Literary Tradition: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One-Hundred Years of Solitude"
James C. Jupp
The English Journal, Vol. 89, No. 3, Our History, Ourselves (Jan., 2000), pp. 113-115
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Cien anos de soledad: History and the Novel
Anna Marie Taylor
Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 2, No. 3, Colombia: The Anti-Imperialist Struggle (Autumn, 1975), pp. 96-112
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.