At the heart of the tale is the Buendia family whose patriarch founded the town of Macondo. I am only about halfway through the book, and already I have conceded any hope of summarizing the twists and the turns – some of them feasible, others, based on my standards anyhow, completely surreal – encountered by the family, or, as Ursula, the matriarch, calls it, “the line.” On any page you are likely to encounter gypsies and alchemists and babies born with a century’s worth of memory and young men who fall in love with their aunts and the remains of parents contained in a bag that hums and jostles and many, many characters who are named Aureliano, Arcadio, Jose or some combination thereof.
The way my sisters and I tackle books is to read a pre-determined number of pages per week. So, since I tend to get ahead of our schedule, I read each section twice. The story is hard to follow, so a second read is helpful, but the main reason I’ve read each page twice thus far is that I’ve permitted myself the luxury of dedicating the first reading to simply enjoying the sensation that follows the intake of a truly exquisite sentence. They’re infused with personal history, swerving, often with nothing more than a comma, from one generation to the next, or a couple back. They are thrust forward by action, by movement, by a masterful use of the verb.
In the sentences of One Hundred Years of Solitude, time comes home to roost with the most prudent use of language I’ve ever read. Here, just for fun, are two of my favorites thus far.
Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans with which Jose Arcadio Buendia had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Ursula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle. [221]
Which explains, among other things, not the plot of the novel, or its theme, but the writing, because time is indeed going in a circle, one that expands and contracts many times on a single page, often within a single sentence. Jose Arcadio Beundia is Ursula’s husband, long gone but eternally present, the founder of Macando. Aureliano Triste is one of her 17 grandsons who bear the name Aureliano, each of whom was born of a different mother during the war years. He shows up in Macondo one day with the rest of them – it is quite a gathering – and is one of the two Aurelianos to take up permanent residence there. The other Aureliano to remain in Macondo – Aureliano Cantes – picks up the family’s multi-generational fascination with the making of ice, drawing from a childhood memory that is not his own but his father’s, who is Colonel Auereliano Buendia.
I am not certain about this but the main character of the book is either the colonel – the original Aureliano Buendias – or his mother, Ursula. Thus far, I believe it is the colonel. For me, he seems the most likely embodiment of the theme, which seems to me to be pitfalls of becoming a part of the world::
Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. [199]
