One Hundred Years of Solitude – The end

Let’s get the book review out of the way first: this was a great fucking book. Or, you could look at it as a fucking great book. Either way.

If you’re planning on reading the book yourself, Lebron, then stop reading now or else I’m going to give too much away for you.

Here is a book that was clearly begun with the end in mind. How many otherwise really good books end with all the punch of a Saturday Night Live skit. But Marquez ends this so naturally, so gracefully. While I’ve been looking at the different solitudes within which the characters exist, Marquez has had a town living its entire existence in solitude. I particularly like how every character’s circle is completed except for one of the four friends, Gabriel, who exists in Paris, and might perhaps be able to tell the tale of Macondo. As you’ve undoubetedly read before on this blog, I’m very interested in texts that challenge conventional ways of thinking about space and time. When you consider Melquiades’ parchments, and the key divined by Aureliano Babilonia at the very end, you get even more appreciation for the ambiguities and unrealities of the novel. Here’s a sentence from page 415:

“He sank into the rocking chair, the same on in which Rebeca had sat during the ealy days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colono Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amaranta Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.” (414)

It is at this point that the key to the parchment is revealed to him, and after he discovers that secret, he discovers this about the parchments:

“It was the history of the family, written by Melquiades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd oned in a Lacedemonian military code. The final protection, which Aureliano had begun to glimpse when he let himself be confused by the love of Amaranta Ursula, was based on the fact that Melquiades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.” (415)

At one point in the story there is mention of nesting dolls; as I was reading the second half of the novel I had that image come into my head a few times when I considered the way that something happening in the novel’s present had already happened in its past. I’ll write more later about what happened between the previous post and the ending, about the way the foreshadowing mentioned before came to fruition, but when you’re sitting at some beachside table next to Michael Weston, Lebron, you really need to read this book. It will give you an entirely new perspective on place, and on the free will that we’re so certain governs our decisionmaking.

In the meantime, I’ve got to get to something else non-literature related, and then type up a bunch of the great sentences and passages from the book, sentences I haven’t organized into thematic categories. Adios.