All the Stuff I’ve Written About One Hundred Years of Solitude up to page 180 or so

Originally, I was planning on reading for enjoyment. By the time I got to page 268, I was stopping to jot down thoughts and observations on the novel without even resenting the interruptions. What you'll see below is what I've typed from my notebook. My thinking goes from the chronicling of facts on July 2, to some thoughts about the events of the story, and then to making connections (wow, just like school). By the time I get to the next post, which covers pages 181-268, I'll be copying quotes and developing a way of seeing how solitude is relevant to each of the characters. I have a feeling that I'm on my way to doing some reflecting about the nature of solitude, but I guess I gave that one away in my last post.

July 2: Just the Facts – the time for noticing things

The Buendia family – Juan Arcadio and Ursula – establish Macondo on a failed pilgrimage to the sea as they followed another one of Juan Arcadio’s dreams. They have two sons – Juan Arcadio and Aureliano – and one daughter, Amaranta. Both boys impregnate Pilar Ternera, after which Juan Arcadio runs off with the gypsies and Aureliano stays, removed now from his gloomy inner life and his days spent in the workshop by the passions of Pilar Ternera. Rebeca is left on their doorstep with a sack containing her parents bones and an appetite for dirt and whitewash.

The worlds of the living and the dead are blurred, as Prudencio Aguilar frequently visits his killer, the elder Juan Arcadio, and Melquaides, a gypsy who died a long time ago, returns to Macondo because he can’t stand the solitude of death. When he dies again, he becomes the first person to die in Macondo.

Time, too, is blurred, as generations last what seems to be a hundred years. A story that seems to have its roots in the 1800s features a gift that Sir Walter Raleigh gave to someone’s great-great-grandmother.

The family trade is dreaming, alchemy and metallurgy. Aureliano falls in love with a nine year old girl named Remedios, the daughter of his father’s only sworn enemy, the local magistrate; in America today, we’d call Aureliano a pedophile, though he is willing to wait until she reaches puberty to marry her. Amaranta and Rebeca fall in love with the same Italian craftsman, Pietro Crespi, and when Rebeca is set to marry him, Amaranta promises that she’ll do anything, including murder, to stop the wedding. She’s a pretty tricky plotter, too.

I’m only eighty pages in, and I don’t even bother tracking the magical things, and the magical sentences, that Marquez puts into his story because there is simply too much of both. This may be a good book to include in the AP choice reading (aka Sparknotes) unit.

Oh, I almost forgot that the crazed patriarch of the Buendia family now lives tied to a chestnut tree.


July 3
Ok, so Macondo exists for years without laws and without a cemetery.

Don Apolinar Moscote comes as a magistrate, and Jose Arcadio Buendia tells him that there is nothing to judge and expels his soldiers, but allows him to stay because he doesn’t want to embarrass him in front of his daughters.

Then a priest comes, and wants to build a church. I need to stop interrupting my reading with this writing stuff, but the political reader in me is noticing the intrusion of institutions on the pure place that was Macondo.

What does Macondo have to teach the institutions of civilized society?


July 7
It was a long weekend with a lot of rapidly emptying coolers poolside, which inhibited the reading and writing. I left off with a question about Macondo and civilized institutions, and I discover that it wasn’t really the best question, given what followed. What did the institutions bring to Macondo? Death and violence.

In the return of Jose Arcadio and his marriage almost by force to Rebeca, we witnessed a depravity so strong it caused Pietro Crespi’s suicide and Ursula’s exile of her own son. In Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s continuous rebellion for an idea he doesn’t seem to believe in, or believes in only partially, we get a glimpse into the ignorance of militancy – and he’s the leader who’s not corrupt.

Such power Pilar Ternera held, using sex to turn these young men away from intimacy and to a life of itinerant bloodshed. Cormac McCarthy should follow these guys around.

Back in Macondo, we see that governmental authority, civilian and military, exists, but capriciously. It is easily turned from one master to another, except during the tenure of General Jose Raquel Moncado, whose efforts to make both war and peace more humane lead him to one of Aureliano’s firing squads. Now Mom is really mad at him.

…one chapter later…

Interesting how the logic of the war ultimately revealed itself on page 168 right after I had written the lines above.

What has become most interesting, however, by this point around page 180ish, is the role of solitude in the novel. Aureliano’s solitude is almost impenetrable, an inner coldness that requires him to wear a blanket around his shoulders. Several times in this past chapter Marquez makes mention of his solitude. Ursula’s solitude has also been mentioned a few times, but she seems to more actively shut the world out, and then re-engage it through her own will.



The elder Jose Arcadio Buendia is the most explicitly solitary member of the family, but I can’t recall right now whether or not Marquez has connected him to the word solitude since his connection was made to the chestnut tree.