Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Where are the braids of my great-grandmother, the bread loaves shaped by my great-great-grandfather's hands in his backery 150 years ago, where do I find the string, on which the generations are strung like beads? Perhaps the beads have turned to dust with the decades of wear, as the smiles of my great aunts circled like fall leaves in the streets of the post-war years and disappeared under the tires of soviet automobiles and the many identical soles of soviet citizens, unidelized back into reality by the length of the milk lines. Or maybe somewhere, under the trunk of my subconscious, the dainty dust bunnies of faded generations are hiding still, holding their grudge against the moderns and their computers.
But they are almost as good as forgotten, as we, schoolchildren, learn to write the same mistakes in grammar school, and decide for the same reasons and out of the same greed to wage different wars, where the prison camps will have toilets as bad as in 1945 (see Guenter Eich, "Latrine"). But the murmuring denizens of the reality called the Past will keep haunting us just a little bit, even through the din of the city and the plastic shells of ear-phones. And reality it is, this Past, by the virtue of having existed sometime. Yes, there is still Soviet Russia, there is still Ghengis Khan and the Beligan colonization of the Congo. And the people who have given rise to us almost anawares, exist somewhere as a part of the Everything that is known. Only we, who are fortuitously living in the present, forget to remember them.

This is what "100 Years of Solitude" speaks and murmurs about in one's ear. The history repeats and mirrors itself with a mocking smile in different decades on different faces, and the past, no matter how forgotten, is a part of the long chain with only one link in the present. As the names repeat, so personalities repeat, with subtle variations, with hereditary memory and hereditary forgetfulness. It is not only the tale about the cycle of time and history doomed to forgetfulness. It is a tale of real people with real bones existing almost independently from the history that bore them and suffering their own passions and tragedies as people do. To all of this add flying carpets, insomnia plagues and levitating priests, fueled by hot chocolate, and the light of truth will reveal itself before your eyes. Wonderful book to read, and reread when turning older and less foolish.