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Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude in English) follows seven generations of the Buendía family as they head the foundation, growth, and ultimately, destruction, of the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The book doesn’t have an overarching plot per see: each chapter consists of a number of vignettes about the family in a certain epoch of Macondo, which are pumped up on magical realism and read to me like someone describing their exploits in a multi-generational game of the Sims 1 . There are some patterns to the madness: most male members of the family are called José Arcadio or Aureliano, and share personality traits, memories, and perhaps destinies with all the individuals of that share their name. Common plot threads also abound: incestuous forbidden love, vague political conflict, and a push-pull with the outside world. There is also a civilizational plot at work here: Macondo is a being that grows, flourishes, becomes decadent and finally dies.
My Background with the Book
I started learning Spanish all the way back in 2020, and this was one of the book was one of the reasons for doing so. We had read A Chronicle of a Death Foretold in one of my high-school English classes, and I was fascinated by the way Gabriel García Márquez (I’ll be referring to him as Gabo from now on) wrote and constructed his stories. This was apparently THE Gabo book to read, so pretty much as soon as I had finished the Harry Potter series I ordered the book. Looking back through my blog records it seems like I tried to read it two or three separate occasions. The first was around 400 hours of Spanish, and I think I gave up about 30 pages. The second and third attempts in 2023 and 2024 respectively went much better, but I still only made it around a quarter of the way through, after the first patriarch of the book dies. I added the book to my ten books to read before I die list, which was enough motivation for me to finish the book this time, though the last 200 pages of the book were like pulling teeth. I’m sad to say it, after being 3/3 on my ten books, but I don’t think Cien Años is a good book, and would recommend you read some of Gabo’s other (and better) stories. I’ll elaborate on why this is below, but in short I had issues with the structure of the novel and the use of magical realism. That being said, I still thought that Cien Años did have something valuable to say on the dangers of self-absorption for social elites.
Episodic stories and the phantom plot development
I talked earlier in my review of Infinite Jest about how important the relationship between story structure and theme is. Infinite Jest does this through the difficulty of its first 300 pages, using this structural choice to reinforce Wallace’s point about how culture and entertainment are not equivalent. In Cien Años, Gabo uses the vignette to emphasize similarities between the lives of different characters, reinforcing themes of cyclical history, that there is nothing new under the sun, and historical determinism: that much of what will happen has been foretold by previous generations, although they may not have the tools to decipher the vague prophecies that they have been given.
There is nothing wrong with an episodic structure per see. Most books use it to some extent. But usually the individual episodes are in service to a larger plot or character development. Two books that do this really well I think are Harry Potter and The Hobbit. The middle half of every Harry Potter novel usually consists of various unrelated adventures that take place through the school year. Yet each adventure either drops a key hint about a larger overarching mystery plot of the novel, which comes to be important in the final quarter of the book, or serves to develop one or more of our characters (or both). In The Hobbit, each of the self-contained adventures in the chapters of the first half of the book serve to make us (and the dwarves) trust Bilbo as a burglar and leader, without which his interactions with Smaug and the Arkenstone in the finale would be unbelievable.
I think the episodic nature of Cien Años didn’t work for me because the multigenerational nature of the story means it can’t do the things that Harry Potter and The Hobbit can. There is no overarching plot, so the story can’t drop important tidbits that will be important for the finale: there isn’t even really a finale, rather just a vague descent into decadence and doom. While in the first half of the novel there was some character development, by page 150 characters were already dying off, meaning Gabo had to start all over again. Now I appreciate some of what Gabo was trying to do with this structure: namely create a confused sense of the passage of time, which is present even in the first iconic line of the book 2 , but the overall structure just didn’t work for me.
Magical Realism Cheapens Character Development
There’s some debate as to what “Magical Realism” as a genre or creative choice actually means, and whether it is distinct from fantasy. My personal position (and definition) is that magical realism is distinct subset of the fantasy genre that places fantastical events in the midst of every day life, and that these events are not treated as abnormal by the plot or the characters. The sub-genre in some way has always been a thing: this is exactly what fairy stories are, but was popularized by the “Latin American boom” of the mid-20th century by writers like Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabo himself.
Let me be clear, I don’t think magical realism is a ticket to a bad story. Cortázar uses magical realism to great effect in many of his short stories, creating an aura of strangeness and unreality that help to highlight those same emotions in the reader 3 . Similarly, in Como Agua para Chocolate, Laura Esquivel gives food cooked by the main character absurd magical powers to highlight the important role that food has in our sense of self and family. Magical realism works best by turning up to 11 the personal struggles, wants, and fears of our characters. There are instances in which this works well in Cien Años: my favorite example is how an American banana planation just pops up in Macondo overnight, at least from the point of the Buendías, emphasizing how disconnected they really are from what is going on in the town.
Yet unfortunately, magical realism seems to used in this novel quite a lot to get out of inconvenient plot snafus. Have Aureliano fall in love with a prebuscent girl. Rather than actually deal with how messed up that relationship is, have her prematurely hit puberty and become wise beyond her years. Have a woman so beautiful that every man that sees her fall in love with her while she is completely oblivious. Rather than work through the potentially interesting character development that could result from that, instead have her carried to heaven by her laundry. Have one of your characters have seventeen kids all named after him by different women. Quickly kill them all off because you don’t know how to develop those characters. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Elite’s Should be Connected with the People they Govern
One thing that I did like about Cien Años de Soledad is the emphasis it placed on the dangers of self-absorption of a social elite. The tension between self-absorption (or solitude) and connectedness is present in the very first chapter. The matriarch and patriarch of the Buendía family are second cousins, a sign of the incestuous obsessions that will plague the family for the rest of the book. José Arcadio Buendía, the first patriarch of the family, spends the first few chapters vacillating between vainglorious scientific endeavors, and actually being a practical, good leader of Macondo, a trait which all his descendants share to some extent. While better than her husband to some extent in terms of being practically minded, Ursula, the first matriarch, is obsessed with appearances and the reputation of the family above all else, which also leads to disaster on multiple occasions. This endogamic self-absorption leads the characters to fail to connect to one another, giving the book its title, but also for them to blindsided by social forces, such as civil war, commercial colonization by the Americans, and finally the decadence and decay that dooms Macondo. I think what Gabo is trying to say here is that elites need to be connected to the people and places they govern, which might seem like a rather obvious message, but its one that historically seems very difficult to learn.
Overall, although Cien Años did have some interesting things to say, and in some ways was a very entertaining and fun book, I found it a bit of a slog, and would recommend reading other Gabo stories, probably his shorter works, instead.
3/5 stars.
This is an early 2000s video game where you control a household of Sims (simulated humans). The intended gameplay is for you to live out quotidian fantasies such as building your own mansion, or working as firefighter, but the functionalities of the game mean you can quickly go off the deep-end.
Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano had to remember that remote afternoon in which his father took him to encounter the ice”.
My favorite story of his is Casa Tomada
Huh, interesting - I actually attempted something similar. After getting pretty good at Spanish following a few years of what passes as an immersion experience, and taking a university Spanish class or two on top (including a Spanish lit class), I also decided I really wanted to read it (plus, had some at least decent Latin American history knowledge, thanks IB program). It's a cool book in principle, but the execution, I agree. Tried twice, got only to about 100 pages in the second time, and came to basically the same conclusion. On a technical level, it's super cool. Was neat to read in Spanish. But as a book, ehhhh...
If you find a more enjoyable Spanish book (not Marquez cuz I'm still burned out) though, that's worth it in original Spanish as opposed to a translation, I'm all ears. Could be nice to brush up again a bit.
I've read a lot in Spanish (108 books total, 62 originally written in Spanish). I have a list that needs to be updated a little bit, but some of my favorites below.
Olvidado Rey Gudú: This actually doesn't have a translation to English at all, so you need Spanish (or Italian or German to read it). It's basically Game of Thrones crossed with a fairy story. Haven't read anything like it. I wrote an in-depth review of it here
El Sentimiento Tragico de La Vida: This is a philosophy book that tries to tie together christianity and existentialism. Much like Kierkegaard. I wrote an in-depth review of it here
La Invención de Morel: This is a short novella about a guy trapped on a creepy island filled with holograms. Was intended as a parable against TV.
Los Cuerpos del Verano: This is also a short science fiction novel about a world where death no longer exists because people are uploaded to the net when they're dying. New bodies are an option, but the quality of the body you get depends a lot on your social status. Our protagonist gets the body of middle-aged women (he's a dude). I really recommend this one, and you can find my longer review of it here
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I would commend to you El Astillero (The Shipyard) by Juan Carlos Onetti. One of my personal favorite books.
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Quality post. You probably won't like Elena Ferrante if you didn't like the lack of plot in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I think one aspect that is missing from your analysis is that it is primarily a parody/parable of Latin American history.
Yes, definitely something I missed. I didn’t really want to comment much on that because I don’t know much Latin American history.
There's certainly a book there without it, but it becomes rather like reading Animal Farm without referencing the Soviet Union.
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This is kind of a tangent off your post, but Como Agua Para Chocolate always reminds me of how it taught me the amount of information we can lack from cultural context. When I took Spanish in college, the movie version of that was one of the works we could get from the library to practice our Spanish. And I knew what the title literally meant, but completely misunderstood the meaning behind the words. I had no idea that sometimes people will make hot chocolate by combining boiling water and chocolate (since here in the US we use powder and it's kinda 50/50 on whether we use milk or water for the liquid). So as best as I could figure, the title was referring to the feeling when you eat a lot of chocolate at once and it makes you really thirsty. A glass of water is super refreshing at times like that. So even though I knew the literal meaning of the words, cultural context meant I took away a very different interpretation than what the author intended. Communication is a funny thing sometimes.
Your old interpretation made me laugh out loud. There is some backing for that reading in the text. It's been while for since I read it, but I think one of the main characters kills herself by eating a box of candles.
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