One Hundred Years of Solitude

It's sort of strange that the lives of the Buendias are already planned out and that no matter if they try to change their fate, they will always follow the already planned out fate of their lives.

that's true katie, it's bizarre that their names dictate what their personalaities will be like. like aureliano is a bit more pensive and mental, but arcadio is strong and belligerent. then the twins up and flip that upside down! i really enjoyed that mystical kind of i dunno, fantastical side of the story. it was fictitious, but it was written in a way that i thought it was so real. it was written very straightforwardly. ive read other works of garcia marquez, and let me say that this ending was beautifully conclusive. AISHA were are you!?

Although I agree with Katie's statement that it was weird that the names have a connection with how the personality of the character turns out, I did not enjoy the magical realism in the story. It was really difficult to read and track all of the characters and who was their biological parents and who actually parented them. The whole situation with Amaranta and Aureliano Jose really wigged me out! I mean she is really old for him on top of the fact that it is an incestuous relationship (not that it is that uncommon in this book!)

I totally agree with you Aisha on the fact that incestuous relationships in the book are really common and also that it was pretty hard to track who was who's child, father, mother, etc. I think that using magical realism to tell a historical story is a really bad idea because it causes the reader to lose track of what has happened and what is happening at that point. Since it's so difficult to keep track I think a better way that I could have read it or if I go back and read it again, is to write down who each character is and try to get/keep straight the events in the book. I really did not read it differently than reading a regular novel.

Magical realism really helps to show odd things that pop up into the book like when the gypsies came to town an showed the people ice which made them amazed and flip out over a simple thing as ice. Also the whole gypsy thing shows that the people that live in the town are really sheltered and are really secluded from the outside world.

Yeah Katie, I agree that it was really weird to see how much people flipped out when they saw normal everyday things like ice, but I don't think that it meant that the town was completely secluded. Although throughout the novel the author keeps on reiterating how there are no roads and that this plot of land was really hard to find, I think that the author included the amazement of the villagers to show through the text the time setting. Like the ice thing happened near the beginning of the novel, so the villagers are less educated because it is at the beginning of the one hundred years that the story spans. I also had a lot of trouble keeping track of which Jose Arcadio or which Aureliano was the one that they were speaking of because people lived freakishly long in that book!

i had trouble realizing the progression of technology throughout the book. the time period was so large, probably a hundred years or something, that i couldn't really pinpoint how far along they were. in the beginning, as you two have already said, ice was a marvel, but about halfway through there is a train station and modern warfare. hmm. Pilar Ternaera put me through a loop because i thought she was dead for most of the book and she kept on kicking. i think i confused her with the name of another character, which was no fun. i was like, why is santa sofia de la piedad telling fortunes!?! in any event, i dont think that i read this novel differently than i have most others, it was just large and complex. i had to rememebr a lot about the characters. a lot of times i went throug the book and realized, wow i think this is supposed to be much more significatnt than it is, but im not seeing the connection. 100 years of solitude was definitely a read that you need to prepare for, and seeing as i took a month off of reading it, i was pretty well out of the loop. ps i didnt think the incestuous thing was that bad, i mean yeah thats kind of bizarre, but a) amaranta was fucked up to begin with because she couldnt commit (poor pietro!) but it seems like its all in the family for the buendias. ursula was concerned about babies with tails, and that was at the beginning of the family tree! imagine what we dont know about the buendia family history!

i think that this book is both a history of life in Macondo, and a mycrocosm for a lot of human history. It's pretty telling of a lot of human archetypes. if you cut out the fantastic and magic imagery, youre left with a bare bones account of the human condition. a lot of the character types are pretty standard i think. i mean, just the fact that war and love made such huge impacts in the book, too. maybe im way off here.

btw way is it that every chapter there happens to be enough decay and devastation for the entire house to warrant a complete renovation and cleaning. SO ANNOYING!

Yeah you could totally see the character archetypes exemplified throughout the novel, but that didn't really make it any more enjoyable to read. I know that magical realism helped this novel because it kind of gave us a glimpse as to what the people of that time and area believed, but it didn't really add to my reading experience, if that makes any sense.Or I would have liked a more historical view of the Biendia family to kind of contrast it to OHS (not that i have ever been a real fan of existentialism). I really grew to hate Amaranta throughout the novel, first with Pietro then the Aureliano Jose, I mean really! I know that in the end of the story we learned that it wasn't that she didn't love them, it was that she loved too much, but i mean you made the man kill himself, you could have flashed him a smile or two! I just thought that was ridiculus, especially with the black armband too, I mean I am a romantic but seriously woman! Its been fifty years, you didn't even want to marry the guy!
And Kyle, I kind of thought that Ursula was the most normal out of all of the Biendias, since she was hardworking and kind of kept the family together, even though she had her superstitions.

If you couldn't tell by now, I really did not like this book!

first of all Aisha, I don't think that the magical realism was the thing that informed the reader of what the family believed, or exemplified the time and place of Macondo. I mean, by the end of the novel, aren't the Buendias outcasts in their community? Of course we are given a sense of what the general public believes based on a lot of the history that is given to us, but I done think that magical realism has anything to do with that. Sorry for typing errors, I did this on my iPod.

aisha I saw your mama khan last night. Your dad got lost in the theater! Aahaahah

I absolutely hated this book. I couldn't keep the characters straight and the magical realism did not help the fact of keeping characters and the events. This book took me about a month to read also and by the end of the book I couldn't remember what had happened at the beginning of the book. I do agree with Aisha that Ursula was the only person who worked hard and tried to keep the family together even through the rough parts.

I actually disagree with you Kyle because the Buendias are kind of the leaders of their community and were the ones that choose where the village was set up. And if the magical realism didn't play a part in giving a sense of what the people believed, what part did it play in the story? (sorry that came out excessively sassy!) Yeah I do agree with Katie, this book was not exactly an easy read. It took me about a month also and I am a very fast reader.

aisha, the genre of the book does not necessarily have to determine what the people believed. they seriously have no correlation. the choice of magical realism as the genre of the book is purely a stylistic choice of Garcia Marquez's. magical realism was merely the way that the author presented the plot line, it wasnt the plot line itself. no, i totally agree that the buendias are iconic in the village of macondo in the beginning, but if how you feel about all of the incest that happened in the book is reflective of what the citizens thought, then the buendias were certainly freaks by the end of the novel. Their lineage may have been exemplary, but many of the characters are fairly prodigal throughout the story.

SUCKA

Well KATIE, since you are the only person that I am still speaking to in this book discussion. What did you think about the Queen's daughter that had a child out of wedlock? Didn't you think that she was going to be the next Ursula? I was so depressed when her lover got shot and she got sent away. It was one of the most depressing things in this book in my opinon.