One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

 I have read some Gabo so i know what to expect in his books - loads on misogyny, domestic violence, cheating, statutory or actual rape, magical realism, dark humour, death, lots of characters related to each other in complex ways. Also a complex layered story and some hard unforgiving writing. Hence when i started One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was prepared. Only I wasn’t.

This book spans a hundred years of a family starting from Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Igurian moving to a new place with a handful off families and setting up a hamlet far away from any settlement. From here, we trace at least 6 generations of this family through cyclical tragedies and triumphs. Political and religious undertones drive the story line and incidents narrated. While it does not draw from history directly, the references to communism and capitalism, fight for workers rights, massacres and wars etc seem to be inspired by different historical events.  

While as a story it is powerful, i found this difficult to read, both cognitively and emotionally. Cognitive because all characters (and there are many) more or less have the same names. So I found myself often referring to the family tree to clarify who was being talked of. And emotionally because of all the misogyny and incest that occupied a large part of the book. In fact, incest is an underlying theme throughout, with the first couple who start the hamlet being first cousins. After that, it is with siblings, aunts and uncles, brothers with the same woman….The family fears that this incest will lead to a baby that is deformed (the fear is that the baby will be born with a pig’s tail) and that is what happens at the end.

While many readers have loved the ending where it is revealed that all this was predicted to happen and will only end with the last descendent, i did not find it as impressive. Possibly because i was stuck with the other aspects and could not appreciate anything else.