One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

     I recently read One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. It is a novel that describes the foundation and fall of the town Macondo, and with it its founding family, the Buendías.

     The book spans over more than a hundred years, and you get lost in the generations. It covers early technology,  a civil war, factory and civil rights issues, and plagues. There are so many characters named Aureliano, José Arcadio, Arcadio, Amaranta, Remedios and Ursula, that you get confused as to who is the son of who and if Aureliano is Meme's son or great- grandfather (he's neither.)

      However, as you read the book, you begin to understand that the characters all have the same personalities as their namesakes. You don't even need to worry about who's related to who, because as long as you know their name you understand their personality( I stopped rigorously flipping to the family tree about halfway through, when I realized this.) Aurelianos are always thoughtful and vague, José Arcadios rough and rational, Remedioses beautiful and innocent. Throughout the years, the same characters appear over and over again (only with more flaws each time).The overarching mentor character, Melquíades, even comes back from the dead so as to repeat his teachings to the younger generation.

     In the story, the characters have similiar personalities, but their flaws are not fixed.
 The same mistakes are made over and over, cousin marries cousin, and characters have children with the same prostitute their grandfather did (ew.) The town is founded, becomes a bustling city, and then falls, victim to the never ending cycle.

     You can practically feel the history go around and around, which brings us to what I've been talking about this whole time and what I think is one of Márquez's main themes: time. He is trying to point out that everything repeats itself and rarely improves.

     I got the sense from this book that Gabriel García Márquez must've been a pretty cynical guy. The Buendías eventually repeat and deteriorate until there are only two left (who have a child with a pig's tail who, ultimately, dies). The town is doomed from the start, and I think that maybe Márquez is trying to say that everything is doomed, and everything ends.