I just finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My journey with this book started with fascination, moved towards frustration and ended with awe.

The Fascination

In the beginning, I was enjoying the rambling prose as one event melted seamlessly into ten others and we jumped back and forth in time. I enjoyed the constant parade of unique characters, each one a caricature of sorts but at the same time very “real”. Marquez has a deep understanding of how we humans think and what drives us. He presents humans in all our flawed beauty without any shame or disgust. There are no good guys or bad guys in this novel; just chaotic complex humans, busy with their own peculiar preoccupations. (Most often love and sex.)

As more and more Jose Arcadios and Aurelianos were born, I even enjoyed giving up my usual obsessive compulsive desire to understand exactly what was happening at every given moment.

The Frustration

Then, more than half way through the novel, I started getting tired of this infinite quirkiness and confusion. It seemed like things just keep happening, without any overall narrative arc. Some of those things were interesting in themselves, like the railyard massacre, but a growing suspicion threatened me that in the end, nothing really will have happened and we’d just have a highly entertaining, sometimes frustrating and confusing, series of meaningless events, one after another.

Another frustration came from waiting to hear more about the Gypsy’s manuscript. The blurb on the back cover mentioned it as a prominent device in the story but nothing was being revealed about it. I started to wonder, how is this book going to end?

As I approached the last chapters, I realized that it will end with everyone dying off. There’ll be no more Buendias to talk about and that’ll be that. It seemed like it was going to be a disappointing end with many mysteries left unanswered. Having learned to love Haruki Murakami, I’ve developed a tolerance for open endings. At least in Murakami’s books you can feel the magic. You can feel as if you’re right on the verge of grasping what it all means. Then a half open ending doesn’t hurt that much because you’re happy to have been on the magical journey. With Marquez, I felt there was no rhyme or reason behind the magical things and it was just an exhibition of quirkiness.

Spoiler Alert

Now I’m going to talk about the end of the book and why it left me with a feeling of awe, so here’s a spoiler warning. If you haven’t read the book, skip the next section or your experience of the end might not be the same. You’ve been warned!

The Ending

In the very last chapter, with a handful of pages left, there is a horrifying visual; a dead baby, the last Buendias, who died of neglect, being carried away by ants. It reminded me of that one scene from Trainspotting which has stopped me from rewatching that amazing movie ever again. I thought, “Was all this humor leading to this ending with such a tragic image? How cruel!”

But then, at that very moment, Aureliano deciphers the last key of Melquiades’ code and rushes to read the manuscript. The way the manuscript is described, we realize that this book that we’ve been reading, is what the Gypsy had written in his manuscript. Immediately the frustration of not knowing what was in the manuscript was gone and replaced with admiration for Marquez for revealing the entire manuscript to us readers.

As Aureliano rushes ahead to read about how he’s going to die, a cyclone rips apart Macondo and the house. The last line of the manuscript tells him that he’ll die when he reads the last line of the manuscript. And so will Macondo and all memory of the Buendias clan.

That is an amazingly well closed ending! I was not expecting that at all. The entire story is closed off so neatly that my obsessive compulsive side stood up and applauded Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And now the weirdness and the magical things at least are neatly contained within the closed loop of the book’s pages, and so it’s okay that we don’t have any inkling of why those things happened.

The Awe

I was already more satisfied with the ending than I was ever expecting. But as I pondered about it all, I realized that one way of interpreting this book is as a metaphor for all of humanity.

I know that literary analysis of the book talks about it being about the Latin American experience. Since I’m not from that part of the world, all the references to historical events and Latin American culture did not register for me. Instead, for me, the book was rather about all of humanity.

Like the Buendias, we have built this weird little village on this planet. Like them we’re all quirky and weird and flawed. We all have our preoccupations and obsessions. And we’re busy doing whatever we want to do without a care in the world but in the end we’re all going to die and disappear. Our ghosts might roam around for a while but eventually even our memory will be gone.

This interpretation filled me with awe for the book and its author. I realized that the frustration I felt in the middle is by design. Marquez wants us to feel that way. Maybe it’s his way of sharing with us how frustrating human history is with our endlessly repeating mistakes and cycles. Maybe he does it so that the ending lands with more impact. Either way, it’s masterful storytelling.

Perhaps human civilization will also end like Macondo and the planet will be reclaimed by nature. Despite being a nihilist, I’m not someone who hates humanity or wishes we all died away. But I do find this prophecy, rather beautiful to be honest. It would be tragic but somehow fitting if all memories of humanity too will be erased, perhaps after one hundred thousand years of solitude.

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Cover Photo by Adam Bignell on Unsplash