"‘It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.’

Few memories of reading a book can match the sweetness of the warm spring day while at university when I sat in the grass down by a river and began Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterful One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel gripped me immediately and I followed the myth-like tales of the Buendía family and the fictional town of Macondo across multiple generations until the sunlight had vanished, the sound of the river adding an idyllic rhythm to my reading that made me keenly aware of the passage of time the idea of one thing flowing into the next. This novel truly is a tour de force earning its canonization not only as a crucial work of Latin American literature but as an internationally renowned novel of great beauty and insight. The amalgamation of stories all colliding within the novel form a complex web of critical analysis of history that functions as commentary on colonialism, political struggles of war and life under dictatorship, as well as interpersonal issues of family, legacy and love or the lack of it, making this a dense yet delightful novel that will forever reside within the hearts and minds of its readers.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was written in the span of just 18 months but will linger on in immortality as an important work of 20th century literature. It has sold over 50 million copies in over 25 languages (translated into english by the incredible Gregory Rabassa, the former WWII cryptologist was handpicked by Marquez for the task and reportedly said that Rabassa’s translation was better than his original in Spanish) and continues to charm readers everywhere. It is a cornerstone of modern Latin American Literature that has made Marquez a household name along with Jorge Luis Borges, from whom Marquez drew much inspiration (particularly from the story The Garden of Forking Paths which you can read here and inspired the cyclical ending of the novel).

Harold Bloom wrote of One Hundred Years of Solitude that ‘It is all story, where everything conceivable and inconceivable is happening at once.’ And indeed it does feel as if the whole of life is bursting forth from the book, which is a family epic that spans from the 1820’s through the 1920’s. Marquez combines his mythmaking with historical events, using magical realism as a political action of uncovering the meaning hiding in plain sight of historical reality. Carlos Fuentes writes in The Great Latin American Novel that Marquez’s storytelling serves ‘as an act of knowledge, as a negation of the false documents of the civil state which, until very recently papered over our reality.’ While Marquez says in a 1988 interview ‘there's not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality,’ it seems to affirm Fuente’s analysis and point to the reality in storytelling being a method to unlock a reality in life previously unobservable.

In this manner of magical realism, Marquez can move from tales of extraordinarily large men, women floating away into the sky, or absurdly long rain storms to actual historical events, such as the Banana Massacre when the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita) called in the army to massacre striking workers at the request of the US. Through this work and it’s investigations into US military intervention, dictatorships and revolutionaries, Marquez wrests the official narrative of history from the colonialist lenses that would prescribe a narrative to the Latin American countries they sought to exploit and gives history its own mythological life to function more freely. This also opens the novel up to multiple ways of reading it, where any of the numerous themes could be emphasized.

‘The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.’

As one would expect, solitude is a major theme working through the novel, with Buendía's own sense of solitude enlarged in the isolation of Macondo, which is falling apart by the end of the book. The weight of feeling ones country collapsing to external forces is strongly imposed as the novel careens towards conclusion, and as new technologies arrive and different societies begin to integrate, those of the old guard feel more and more isolated from the world. None of this moves in a straightforward manner, however, and the ending reveals history to be a cyclical process, one of constant creation and undoing. ‘...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle…’

One Hundred Years of Solitude is truly worth the read and holds a very special place in my heart. It is such a fascinating and fantastic blend of magical realism and historical insight that was a major work in world literature. One to read and read again.

5/5


Buendía family tree (source)"

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This review is now also available at The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM): The Infinite Capacity for Illusion

The words I am about to express:

They now have their own crowned goddess.

THE INFINITE CAPACITY FOR ILLUSION


Whither The Magic?

One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels. Which is why, when I started reading Love in the Time of Cholera, one of the things I noticed immediately was the lack of the subtle brand of magic that I had so enjoyed. I missed it and was on the lookout for it. I wanted it badly and went around every corner with the expectation of a cheerful reunion. But it was not to be.

As Pynchon says: the “reality” of love and the possibility of its ultimate extinction become Love’s “indispensable driving forces,” whereas magic in all its guises and forms becomes peripheralized or “at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clement”. 

Why this marginalization of the extraordinary? Why this deliberate move towards realism? Why no Magic?

I kept asking myself this as I read, and beyond. Was I to understand that it is because Love in itself is Magic? That was too cheesy, even for Márquez who never shies from telling me a cheesy sub-story if it needs to be told.

Or is it because Love in the Time of Cholera is to seen as the product of a more experienced author, who no longer needs the resources of magic realism and hyperbole to surprise the reader?

One thing was sure, Love in the Time of Cholera is not only about Love, even when it pervades every page. Indeed, it covers, through its characters’ wide amorous and business interests, an entire era and all the social classes, spanning over fifty years of Latin American life, from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the first two or three of the twentieth.

Love in the Time of Cholera, while on a much smaller scale than One Hundred Years of Solitude, deals with the Colombian civil wars of this period and the violence left in its wake. Márquez however wants these historical and political concerns to be passed largely unnoticed by the reader. While One Hundred Years of Solitude disguises the political themes through the uses of myth, fantasy, hyperbole, and magic realism, Love in the Time of Cholera disguises them through its depiction of an eternal, sometimes exasperating, almost unrealistic love affair, one which flouts the conventions of every love story the reader might have come across.

Love in the Time of Cholera is often quite bleak due to this veering towards stark Realism, to this occasional historical invasion of the narrative. Much of this realism arises from Death and Decay - the central themes of the novel. However, Márquez does not completely give up on Idealism either. In fact he is neither an Idealistic or a Realistic author - he is just a supremely eloquent voice speaking from the vantage-point of his own old age and wisdom.

To me, Love in the Time of Cholera is a magnificently gloomy novel though Márquez’s masterful sorcery masks it well, with his verbal cascades of descriptions and his narrative’s seductiveness.

Márquez’s novels are almost invariably gloomy. They are apocalyptic. They are decadence distilled.

Then why the popularity? Why do we love them? Why are we uplifted? Is it because of Márquez’s enthusiastic exuberance? 

I think it is because of the Quixotic Heroism of the people who populate these doomed worlds.

It is this heroism that veils the Apocalyptic forebodings that pack so densely like storm clouds throughout the firmament his novels.

After all, Consider how during the entire time he waits to talk to Fermina again (fifty-one years, nine months, and four days) Florentine Ariza is dauntless and never ever gives up even the slightest sliver of hope. Nothing could shake this man:

“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked.

Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.

“Forever,” he said.

The Heart of Darkness: Death & Decay

There is so much I would like to say about this amazing novel. There are so many themes that could be explored. But in this review I will try to focus on the Beginning and the Ending of this intricately structured novel, and try to tease out the the thread that explains the absence of Magic.

The whole novel is too broad a canvas to be explored in a review. For this, I limit myself to the broad themes of Death, Decay & Redemption, and allow the political, ecological, societal and personal aspects of these themes to play themselves out below the current, so to speak.

The Institutions of Love: Inventing Love

He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.

The theme of Juvenal’s love story is about the incompatibility of love and social convention, the conflict between desire and social life. It is quite easily the crucial conundrum the novel wants to solve - the 'other' to the novel's essence. Security, order, happiness - can these when added together in the right proportions provide an equation for Love? 

For the sort of Love that can stop the decay that seems to have beset the entire world? Apparently not. It is not enough.

Through Juvenal’s invented Love, Márquez is not simply criticizing the institution of marriage, instead he is criticizing the very illusion that allows this - the illusion that the world and the worldly goods and pleasures can produce Love.

Instead Márquez wants to show that it is Love that can create (or recreate) the world.

Ultimately Love is love of Love itself, not merely the desire for its actual attainment or even the act of its fulfillment. Passion is its own object.

Pitted against such an impossible ideal, all convention or institutionalization obstructs love’s ultimate goal, which is to forestall death and decay.

The ultimate goal of Love is to save the world, to create it anew.

Gerontophobia & Ecocide: Destroying Love

So why is this world so much in need of saving?

The cosmic decline in Love seems to be the cause for alarm, the cause for the pervasive decay that invades the world of the novel:

Everything in this novel, from the environment, to the city, to the rebels, to the civil wars, to the people, to the pets are ancient - as if they were part of this earth from the very beginning, but everybody is in the throes of love. And everything ancient is also decaying, sliding slowly towards the final end of death - so is the sadness and the conventional love represented by Juvenal.

But it is not just about the human lives. Márquez writes as much about places as about people. This one is also about the death of a river, of a town, of a society… or murder, rather. Of Nature’s Old Age inflicted prematurely by youthful humanity.

This is the ecological sub-theme of the novel - It is the river, finally, the Great Magdalena (in Spanish, the “river of life”) that highlights this for us. The abundant nature that surrounds the town is caught in a process of irreversible decay. Alligators, manatees, monkeys, and birds disappear from the jungle; toward the end, the riverboats have difficulty finding enough wood for their boilers. While the political urgency of this topic is clear, cosmic decline in Love in the Time of Cholera has a different meaning and is linked to the theme of the interruption of love discussed before.

Paralleling the old age of his characters with the decay envisioned by this ecological wasteland (of their own making), Márquez is pointing out to us the true nature of Decay - of Humans and their self inflicted sufferings bringing the decay of old age upon themselves and upon the whole of nature.

This is the central tenet of the novel - Love in the Time of Decay.

However, there is more. And Márquez is not afraid to set this counter theme out in the very opening scene itself:


The Sweet Smell of Bitter Almonds

Counter to the dark theme of decay that is to be developed for most of the rest of the plot, early in the novel, an act of brave revolt against this inevitability establishes the counter-current against the steady march of decay.

Jérémiah de Saint-Amour (soon forgotten and never again mentioned) takes this revolutionary step (again drawing our attention the continuous revolution in which the political life of the novel is set) by choosing to die before decay sets in. This act initiates the long debate that runs throughout the novel about Love and its objective - are we to preserve Love at the expense of Life or to preserve Life through Love? By raising this question so early, by calculating his suicide long beforehand, by choosing to end the world than to let it go to rot, to see it rot, Saint-Amour stays alive through the rest of the novel, haunting it.

Being a witness to the decay of love was the most unbearable to Saint-Amour, the Saint of Love?

What we see dramatized at the end of the book, however, is the possibility of genuine passion and romance in old age. There is a clear contrast between Saint-Amour’s suicide and the protracted love life of Florentino Ariza, but it is a contrast that conceals a profound affinity. Saint-Amour kills himself to preserve his body from decay, to fix its image, as it were, through death.

Love and decay, then, constitute the double focus of this novel, the former being present in countless ways throughout.


Love in The Time of Cholera: The Post-Apocalyptic Paradise

… his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera.

Every page of this novel is rammed full of love, beyond the capacity of any reader to fully comprehend. Love is in the air like Malaria; and in the water, like Cholera - its infections are inescapable!

All aspects of love are covered in exquisite detail - from teenage love to old age; from sexual to rapine to platonic; from formal courtship to marital to unconsummated; to unrequited love to the excesses of suicide and adultery; from the mundane normalcy of love to the incestuous abnormalities.

The reader has to consider carefully in the midst of this overwhelming abundance and variety the treatment that Márquez gives to love in this novel. Love in the novel is not the purely romantic love -carefree, easy flowing, spontaneous, and idealized.

Instead, the novel’s great affirmation of romance, is in the face not just of a hostile or prosaic world, but of the darker side of romance itself.

It is Operatic, Quixotic & Dionysian Love that is celebrated. It is Love as the Second Coming!


Sailing The River of Love: The Voyage of Re-Birth

Youth, Love, Old Age & Death - The Four Unknowns. This should have been the order of Life.

However, in this world of Márquez, the only ages that can hope to be able love/live seem to the Young and the Old. In between lies the desert - the only time we are allowed to live - when not capable of love. It is a paradox on which the very survival of this fictional universe seems to depend on.

Love and Life cannot coexist then - The solution is to give up the life they know for Love. To take the ultimate leap of faith.

So hoist a yellow flag on the Ship of your Life (Second Fidelity) and sail on the Great Magdalena (in Spanish, the “river of life”) in a State of Emergency! Let Love in the Time of Cholera be the entirety of the River of Life. Love should now destroy that earlier Life instead, just as Cholera can squeeze it out. And then be reborn, afresh.

The novel ends with the central characters challenging their entire social world and the very conditions of their existence by their grand romantic gesture, by their final, and what seems like eternal, trip on the Magdalena river. This is the necessary reaction to the decay that is fast on the route to complete extinction, to death.

Love and Cholera will both go extinct otherwise, rooted out by Life.

Love is shown as the redeeming force that saves both humanity, nature, culture and history. It appears as a divine force that defies everything. As if in biblical terms, the novel seems to assert that it is not yet too late to stop the end of humanity and to reach out for grace and happiness.

Most importantly, never allow the Yellow Flag to be questioned. Sustain the ardor. Maintain the symptoms of Cholera/Love. The pestilence is to be maintained at all costs! Only then will the world let you sail on.

Of course, the novel ends with the reader wondering if Fermina and Florentino will ever be able to come ashore and exercise their second chance.

We are left to question this act for ourselves: How do we save the world? By Escape into an Unrealistic Fantasy? Or is love more real? The answer, at least inside Márquez’s world is quite clear.

This final triumph is exquisitely multi-layered. Fermina and Florentino will remain isolated from the real contagion of their earlier Life by allowing their Love to be disguised as Cholera.

They are not rejecting the world, they are allowing the world to reject them instead.

The quarantine is really against love, the sickness that society will not, can not tolerate, the sickness that society fear as much as a deadly epidemic, the sickness that the society fears will wipe it out.

Instead it is that very sickness, which is recognized by conventional society as its biggest scourge, that saves the characters from extinction, along with the manatees, the alligators, and the monkeys.

It is Love that saves all in the end - at least we are left to imagine that possibility. Now, in this Post-Apocalyptic Paradise, age is of no consequence; Life has been transmuted and preserved by Love, like Saint-Amour’s Love by death.

Life has been reborn in the Second Coming of Love!

Love, in short, will always be in the time of cholera, under the Yellow Flag’s protection.


THE INFINITE CAPACITY FOR ILLUSION: The Will to Lyricism

So, now we can come back to the question we started with - of the Absence of Magic.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the apocalypse came in spite of Magic, in Love in the Time of Cholera, redemption comes despite its absence!

Unlike the death that starts off One Hundred Years of Solitude, here that death, the suicide, is ultimately sublimated into love - and decay is arrested in its unreality!

In fact reality has instead been reinvented in their own terms, where previous reality was rejected outright.

The capacity for illusion is magic enough to save the world, and our souls. This Infinite Capacity for Illusion can bring on the required apocalypse and we can live as if the Kingdom of Heaven/Cholera was already here on earth, under that banner of protection!

Only then can the Magic return."

"”I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me and his breath being snarled, as if by a golden thread, deeper and deeper in his throat as he rode--as he rode deeper and deeper not so much into me as into a kingdom which lay just behind his eyes. He worked on wood that way. He worked on stone that way. If I had never seen him work, I might never have known he loved me.

It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”


Stephen James and Kiki Layne star in the 2018 film that was released on December 25th.

Fonny and Tish have known each other nearly their entire lives. Sometimes relationships like this evolve into being friends or at least acquaintances for life. Sometimes they become lovers, and when lightning strikes the same place twice, they become lovers and best friends.

Lightning struck twice.

This is a tale of two families. Tish’s family is not only supportive of the relationship but go so far as to consider Fonny part of their family. As Tish and Fonny are caught up in the whirlwind of 1970s racist New York, the support of Tish’s family is the only thing standing between Fonny spending a good part of his life in jail and Tish having to work the streets to make enough money to afford a lawyer for his defense.

Fonny’s family is a different story. His mother has never thought highly of him or his prospects. She is a religious nut who, in her fervor for her God, has lifted herself up above the rest of humanity. From this perch, she can cast judgments down on those around her, especially those not heeding the call of the church. She would be a better Christian if she were casting bread instead of casting aspersions. Fonny’s two older sisters, taking their cues from their mother, are dismissive of their little brother as well and find it embarrassing, rather than tragic, that he has been arrested. They are sure he is guilty because they have found him guilty his whole life.

Fonny’s father is an interesting character. He is a man who loves his family, but he knows that Fonny needs his love more than the rest. Tish’s father, Joseph, is always bucking Frank up, giving him hope.

”’Look. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying they got us by the balls. Okay. But that’s our flesh and blood, baby: our flesh and blood. I don’t know how we going to do it. I just know we have to do it. I know you ain’t scared for you., and God knows I ain’t scared for me. That boy is got to come out of there. That’s all. And we got to get him out. That’s all. And the first thing we got to do, man, is just not to lose our nerve. We can’t let those cunt-faced, white-assed motherfuckers get away with this shit any longer.’ He subsides, he sips his beer. ‘They been killing our children long enough.’”

James Baldwin was proclaiming that #blacklivesmatter from the beginning of his existence as a writer.

Being a young, virile, prideful, black man in the 1970s was a dangerous thing to be. Fonny, by breathing the same air and walking the same streets as the predominantly white police force, has committed a crime. Yes, he has committed a crime by existing. When he comes to the attention of one particular cop, it is only a matter of time before he is put in the frame for something. This cop has an interest in Fonny that is akin to sexual desire. He pursues him like a spurned lover pursues the person of their affection. He is the head of the hammer of white fear.

”He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of a pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes. But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death. If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky”

The problem is that Fonny is at the pinpoint of that blue eye.

This is a book about injustice, about family sticking together, about community, and it is about love, real love, soul trembling love. It is the type of love that, when your lover walks in the room, you feel your insides turn to Champagne with frenzied bubbles and a cork in your throat trembling to hold it all in.

One thing I’ve learned about life is those that have the least to give, give the most.


Two Bards hanging out together. The conversation they would have had over a bottle of wine.

James Baldwin moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France in 1970. This book was published in 1974. Even though he was an American in exile, America came to him. Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, and many more made pilgrimages to see him. He spent most of his days writing and responding to correspondence from all over the world. He changed lives with his gift of hope and his honesty about what was really happening to Black America. Every time I read one of his books, I am struck by the power of his prose and the passion of his anger. He was determined to drag America, kicking and screaming, under a soul revealing, bright light so the demons of inequality, racism, and hatred have a chance to be exorcised.

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