My wife insists that this novel that I recently found unread on the bookshelf, written by the late famous peripatetic Colombian Nobel laureate, was given to me by my daughter to try to broaden my interest in fiction. If so, it only partially succeeded. It relates a bizarre story of the rise and fall of the fictional isolated town of Maconda somewhere on the Caribbean coast of Columbia and of seven generations of the Buendía family. There are no firm time or place anchors, although my best guess would be that the events span the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
There is seamless mixing of magic realism in which the dead return to haunt the living, flying carpets and sheets carry people off to their deaths, a priest demonstrates levitation, there are plagues of infectious insomnia and floods, and telepathic surgeries leave scars, with realistic characters and family tragedies. A family tree at the start does little to clarify who is who, given the overlapping multiple foreign names of most of the characters, some of whom become invisible talking mirages.
There are flowery vivid descriptions of people. “She was a large black woman with solid bones, the hips of a mare, teats like live melons, and a perfect head armoured with a hard surface of wiry hair which looked like a medieval warrior’s mail headdress.” One man is described as “…. for whom wisdom was not worth anything if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chickpeas.” But there are also run-on nonsensical sentences going on for two pages with multiple conjunctions, a feature I also recall in the author’s much more realistic Love in the Age of Cholera, which I quite enjoyed reading.
To really nitpick, I noted that the translator throughout uses the word ‘cement’ when the proper word should be ‘concrete’.
There is a whole literary genre of magic realism that appeals to a large readership (and apparently to Nobel committees). More than twenty million copies of this novel have been sold. But I am such a realist or concrete thinker that I can only tolerate it in small doses. My copy is being relegated to my ten year old granddaughter’s small lending library on her front lawn.
Thanks, Andra.
The Passionate Reader 