Colombia, Gabriel García Márquez, "100 years of solitude"
- 6 minsTakeAways from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”
Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist. Before starting the analyses of the novel I always like to explore the territory where the writer was living. So, let us first of all try to explore Colombia. I would like to figure out things that Colombia is known for first of all. I have used this link for reference.
Negative things Colombia is known for:
- Pablo Escobar and all drug cartels in the 80s and early 90s.
- #1 producer of cocaine in the world
Positive things Colombia is known for:
- Coffee. Colombian coffee is know all over the world for its softness .
- Emeralds. Best emeralds in the world.
- Pacemaker first functional one was developed by a Colombian, Jorge Reynolds.
- Gabriel García Márquez
I have a great friend from Colombia, who was my roomate in the CIEE conference in a Washington D.C. Daniella Díaz! A very bright person.
Now, as we know a little bit about the Colombia, we are ready to narrow down and explore the biography of Markez.
He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. I guess this is one of the reasons he has grown up without any mind boarders and has created great novels for diverse auditory. He was popular in style magical realism , the style where the magical elements are integrated into the ordianry routine. This is another factor that makes his novels so grabbing.
García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts. Upon García Márquez’s death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia, called him “the greatest Colombian who ever lived. source
Now, let’s summarize some takaways from the novel.
I enjoyed reading the analyses of Mr. Kiely who is a professor of English at Harvard. You can find the article here. The novel is written in the language of a poet who knows the earth and does not fear it as the enemy of the dreamer.
I would share here the favorite parts from the previous review that in my perspective could not be depicted and appreciated more.
The book is a history, not of governments or of formal institutions of the sort which keeps public records, but of a people who, like the earliest descendants of Abraham, are best understood in terms of their relationship to a single family. In a sense, José and Ursula are the only two characters in the story, and all their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are variations on their strengths and weaknesses. José, forever fascinated by the unknown, takes up project after project, invention after invention, in order among other things, to make gold, discover the ocean and photograph God. He eventually goes mad, smashes things, refuses to speak except in Latin and is tied to a giant chestnut tree in the middle of the family garden.
The novel excited me the most as, it gave me an opportunity to follow the rise, development, and the end of the whole Buendias (7 generations) in the small city of Macondo, that they have established. In the development process we are introduced to the way the Buendias love, explore the world, are fighting for their liberal believes. The novel becomes more grabbing when those magical elements are added to the realism. One of the points I think that can be inferred is that the evolution of generations is in some sense looped and is repeated with some relatively small additions. But I think that this inference will be true untill the point where the AI will transcend human intelligence, and after this I think that this loop will be broken. But what will follow after this broken loop, is a deep question that I think contemporary writers of magical realism will try to uleash…
Sources I have visited to see the percpectives of different people on the novel.
Interesting
- The sad Armenian (cigan) was putting a spell for making a man invisible.
- The novel was astonishing with it’s big sentences(2-3 pages)
The most important takeaway for me is, that we can always escape the antagonism and prejudice of the reality in doing things we love or exploring the universe through adding more dimensions in our minds. While, when is it worth doing? Is it good to always escape it and create our new idealistic reality? Who knows :)
Favourite parts (translated from the Russian version, therefore may diverge a little from the original)
- Aureliano Buendia was not interested in trade, the work was helpin g him to fully concentrate, which helped him to find the pure harmony in himself.
- The secret to healthy aging is the calm acceptance of lonliness.
- Ursula was assured that thie time is built in circle, so everything is repeating.
- The border of realliity was so blured that no one could have see it.
- The more Remedios the Beauty was realising herself from fashion, searching for comfort, her beauty was becomming more intriguing.
- The Remedios the Beauty has tolled that will never marry a guy, who is capable of losing an hour of his life, while following a women taking a shower, risking with his lunch.
- The love was enough for Remedios the Beauty, but none of the man was converging to the true definition of it.
- Ursula has noticed, that all of the family members are following exactly the same route daily, but even they were not noticing it. (We are definitely AI machines :) )
- He will learn to think about her in a tranquilized manner, without awakening his feelings.
- Meme was paying for her freedom with doing things that were not totally making her happy.
- Time is moving in circle. (I am sure that this circle will be traced, at the point of singularity). -Nothing interested him, maybe because he did not have any long term memories to relate with the things occuring around. ( interest~LTM)
- In his alive and blue eyes the kindness was shining, a shine characterizing a man who have read all the books of the universe. (kindness~books read (mind dimensions))
- The Aurelianos purpose of reading books, was not in adding knowledge (mind dimensions), he was just searching the approval of the theories he was already aware about.
- The time is enough for everything.
- The appocalypse will be when people will travel in a first class, while books will be delievered seperately on trading vagons.
- The lovers have lost the sense of reality, the understanding of time and have escaped their routine.