One Hundred Years of Solitude - A magical read

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is the most magical book anyone could ever dare to write. Get a hard copy if you can get one and you can sense yourself exploring the story page by page as the founders explored Macondo. It’s a tale of how Eden like place – Macondo and the people in it transform with every changes brought to them. The inhabitants are influenced by the Gypsies, Gringoes, Negroes, Arabs, Turks, introduction of mail, railway and finally the banana company that brings Macondo its downfall. If you are from the past (supposing you came to the present by a time machine) you can feel the enchantment towards the display of ice and kaliedoscope that the forefather feels at the outset. Melquiades, the gypsy, writes a parchment that can be deciphered only after one hundred years from when it was written (thus, the title!) The parchment is forgotten in the next generations; some make futile attempts and is finally read by the last survivor of the family; the town itself erased from human memory at the moment of being read, making it impossible to be repeated. The narrator grippingly takes you throughout all the ups and downs that the town faces that you are left with a heavy lump of an ineffable feeling in the final pages. From a place where the singing birds enlivened the atmosphere, we witness the Macondo where any bird no longer lives. More than the story its those magical elements that lends an indelible charm to the printed pages – the apparitions that live and talk even after they die, the man who knows that the soup would fall even before it fell, the girl whose irresistable beauty kills the beholder, the physical drive of the witch that would make animals procreate rapidly, the man who covers the whole house with bank notes, the crosses of ash on the forehead that can never be washed, the twins who switched themselves vary often and remain unknown what their original name was, the flatulence that would kill the begonias in the garden, Death with blue hair, a lover with the halo of yellow butterflies, the rain that lasted for four years, the child with the pig tail et al. the novel is abound with grinning instances that carries you away from the reality. The tale spans through five generations with children being alternately named Arcadio and Aureliano. Thanks to the family tree at the beginning of the book! You are tempted to refer it evey time a name is mentioned. There are 5 Arcadios and 22 Aurelianos among the 27 male decendants! The narration is so fluid that, at one point of time, you are filled with a nostalgic feeling of snuggling in your grandmother’s lap and hearing the story in her voice. Narration segues from the present-future-present : leaves a thread hanging when the leaps to the future and and like a boomerang comes back to the hanging thread and weaves it neat. Its not the boring classic that takes two score pages to make a story line visible. ‘One hundred years…’ is pacy like being on an express train: at one page the peaceful Macondo is shown and at the third page a civil war breaks out; at one page a child is a child and at the third page the child and his aunt become passionate lovers! Its like you miss a scenic beauty at the blink of an eye on the express train. Marquez takes you through a magical journey and leaves you with an urge to read the book again.