Summer Reading- One Hundred Years of Solitude

Part I-
I hope this post isn't horrible. I read the whole book during a vacation, and it never occurred to me to make note on what I wanted to comment about. Firstly, the names all confused the heck out of me, I'm not going to lie. I made constant reference to the family tree while reading, but it was still very difficult to figure out if it was Jose Arcadio who married Rebecca, or was it Colonel Aureliano? I'm so bad with names. So that was a big time stealer. I totally agree with Paul about the gypsies visit being both a good and bad thing. Although it brings life to the village, it also brings death and anger. It pretty much led to the downfall of Jose Arcadio Buendia in the end. He was so obsessed with finding out the way things work. Marquez wrote "Jose Arcadio Buendia, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth... For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea." (2) He saw what the gypsies did, and he saw so many other things that could be done with it. He talked later of building houses from ice, and tried to make weapons from glass. His imagination, bigger than he was, took him to new heights. But that intensity eventually led to a breakdown. He could have been so smart that he was just misunderstood, but even so, people hate what they cannot grasp. He ended up tied to a tree, living there until a few days before his death. But if Jose Arcadio Buendia had such an unbridled imagination, as it was described, his fate was probably already set. His imagination would have gotten the best of him one way or another, I believe. I also wondered about the amount of incest, along with the links to Christianity as stevie wonder ii pointed out. Although I was mildly disgusted, I was also intrigued by the circle they were paving for themselves. Every act of incest led to a downfall of that couple. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) But at the same time, it was all done in such a loving way that if you could look past the initial horror, you instead find something sweet.With Aureliano wanting to marry a mere child, I think he may have gotten two types of love confused somewhere along the lines. When he had first seen her, he wished to raise her as a daughter, and had that kind of love for her. But the more he thought about her, the more his thoughts changed from a father/ child love to a sexual love. As far as Amaranta goes, I think she was just too afraid to get married, or show her love. Plus, Pietro Crespi pretty much took her because he couldn’t get Rebecca. She was second best. Whether she saw that or not, I can’t really say. Perhaps her heart really was just too tender for the possible pains of marriage.

Part II-Wow! Gypsyloo, can I just say that was some AWESOME insight? I totally agree that the family was like ice. They were together in the beginning, a solid force, but they soon broke apart, melted if you will. So, as many people have pointed out, Meme is very different from her mother, and from the rest of the family. First of all, she does what she wants. She isn’t old fashioned. She does go out to visit with her friends, and all in all lives a more carefree life than most of the other members of the family. Until she gets sent away that is. I feel like she symbolizes the possibility of change. There is no one else called Meme, and even though that’s a nickname, perhaps she can escape from the fate set out for her. I think even getting away from her mother is the best thing that can be done. I think the repetition of names is to show that people just don’t change. In How to Read Literature, the author said that there is only one story ever, and stories always contain parts from other stories. So we have all these men with the same names, and even the women have the same names. No author would do that without a reason. What I don’t understand is why they would keep naming them the same names if they realize they have fallen into a trap. Ursula realizes their fates have been laid down, because she said she always wondered if the twins had gotten their names switched at some point or another. Amaranta seemed to be giving into love with her nephew. I think this really shows that the family is living their lives in circles. It was as if she was destined to fall in love with a family member. She rejected those outside of her family, yet gives into the lust she feels towards Aureliano Jose, for at least a while. It’s like she really doesn’t want to, but somehow keeps going back to him, or in the very least, letting him come to her. Aureliano Jose of course is totally into the idea, much like all the men before him. He doesn’t care who thinks what, or what animal curse the baby would be born with. The wars in this book all confuse me. I don’t even know what to say about them. I’m never sure what they are for. I sort of want to reread the book because I think I’d get more out of it. Who knows.

Part III-
Wow, was I surprised at the ending. That of course is most fresh in my mind, but Meme’s son also came home in the third part. (At least in the way I divided the book he did.) Poor thing, hidden in a closet. That definitely taps into Fernanda’s psychological issues. People were saying they had trouble remembering the book was fiction at times. I felt the same way, but when I read about Meme’s Aureliano being locked in the closet, and at one point escaping, naked and dirty, I was snapped back to remembering it was fictional. Kids locked in closets don’t usually survive since they don’t get the touch and interaction required, but anyway, that is a WHOLE different subject. Sorry, tangent. Another part of the book that totally freaked me out is when there was a whole shooting at the station. The shooting itself didn’t frighten me, but what happened after the fact did. Jose Arcadio Segundo went to a woman’s home to escape, having just awoken in a sea of bodies. He was talking to her, and said “’There must have been three thousand of them,’ he murmured. ‘What?’ ‘The dead,’ he clarified. ‘It must have been all the people who were at the station.’… ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ she said. ‘Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo.’”(308) To deceive people about a death of that high a number is amazing. There had to have been tons of people who were missing after that, yet people still didn’t believe it. Was JAS hallucinating, or going insane, or what? I don’t think he was though, because when he was holding the little boy to see before the shooting, it was said that “Many years later that child would still tell, in spite of people thinking that he was a crazy old man, how Jose Arcadio Segundo had lifted him over his head and hauled him, almost in the air, as if floating on the terror of the crowd, toward a nearby street.”(305) So it must have happened. It reminds me of the people who still deny the Holocaust ever happening. It’s like… people wrote journals on it, how can’t you believe it? Just like the people of Macondo must have known at least a few of the people who were killed if the number was so high. That part really freaked me out. I think the end of the Buendia clan was foreshadowed a lot in the third part. One example that really stuck out was “Aureliano Segundo returned home with his trunks, convinced that not only Ursula but all the inhabitants of Macondo were waiting for [the rain] to clear in order to die.”(322) Pretty much they did. Once the rain cleared, it seemed like the book was all downhill from there. I don’t feel like going into depth as to why, but I felt bad for Gaston. Hooray for pointless sentences!THE ENDING WAS SO COOOOOOOOL! (Sorry, I haven’t slept in awhile.) When I was reading the book I was wondering why they kept sticking with the same names that brought them such a bad fate, but it turns out that they pretty much couldn’t help it because it was already mapped out for them and they had no idea. So the gypsies coming was part of all that, and so was the rain, and nothing could be avoided. Was it because human nature is always going to be the same? Or was Melquiades just so smart and all knowing from his long life and travels? Either way, I really loved the way this book was summed up, all neat and such. Although I guess it wasn’t really that neat. I’m still wondering about the wars and about how Melquiades knew, and such. But I guess that’s what makes it a good book. Anyway, Night!