To try to
read this book is not as brave as an attempt to write about it, yet I am taking
that challenge taking inspiration from none other than the strong-willed Ursula
Iguaran. This masterpiece of Gabriel
José García Márquez has been accoladed in various groups I have been; but the
trigger that set me off to give this a try was the book ‘Memories of Fire’ by Ashok Chopra for which I will
forever be grateful.
Before
handing over the copy, Manu and Ponnu recommended highly not to take up any
other parallel reads and to refer to the Buendia family tree as often as
possible to keep track of the characters. Thanks to them I survived the book
not just unscathed but getting one of the most profound reading experiences in
life. A sentence sounding ‘this book has it all’ is the best and simplest way I
could explain the book. Philosophy, action, romance, inspiration, comedy,
tragedy, beauty, all these, and more, are coated not in sophisticated sugary
stories; rather, outright crazy, raw and untamed human life.
In a brief
nutshell, the story is about the seven generations of Buendia family in the
town of Macondo, a Utopian town founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife
Ursula Iguaran. The novel pans through different generations, different
incidents and different characters and showcases how each and every one is
living in their own solitude. It’s been around 5 months since I finished the
book and things have started falling off my memory but some gems and points, I
have noted down are still etched strong that I can quote below:
-
About Melanquides’s death – As he aged he
was treated as one of the useless great-grandfather who wander about the
bedroom like shades, dragging his feet remembering better times aloud and whom
no one bother about or remember really until the morning they find them dead on
their bed.
-
Ursula appearing in front of the council to the
appeal against the death sentence of General Jose Raquel Moncanda with other
mothers “Don’t forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be
mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull
down your pants
-
The wise Catalanian says, when his 3 boxes of
books were shipped in cargo “the world must all be fucked up when men travel
first class, literature goes cargo”
All the
characters have their own unique thinking and attitude towards life as in real
life. Two characters whom I took to heart (so much so that it gives me
goosebumps just writing about them) are:
1. Ursula Iguaran
- The longest living member who survives through her children, and generations
of grandchildren as well. In the beginning she is just a young wife running
away with her husband due to a situation at their hometown, a simple woman
whose greatest fear is herself or her descendants’ bearing children with
‘pigtails’. As the plot progresses Ursula goes through a roller coaster of
events in her life – from tying her husband to the chestnut tree to welcoming
all seventeen sons of her first born Aureliano; all through these she stands
firm for the well being of her family. While her husband and sons wither away at
their own whims and fancies, Ursula is shown rooted most to reality clutching
all loose ends and patching up the family home as well as its members. One such
occasion of contrast between Urusula and her first-born, Colonel Aureliano
Buendia both not comprehending each other, yet tied together as a family can be
recollected below:
“With her terrible practical sense Ursula could not understand the
colonel’s business as he exchanged little fishes for gold coins and then
converted the coins into little fishes and so on…”
At the end of the novel Ursula turns blind but with her skills she
remarkably hides that from everyone that nobody realizes that she is blind till
she dies. Part covering Ursula’s demise is peculiar and strangely beautiful as
her life:
“..and very few people at the funeral partly
because there were not many left who
remembered her, and partly because it was so hot that noon that the
birds in confusion were running into walls like clay pigeons and breaking
through screens to die in the bedroom”
2. Remedios the
beauty – Remedios the beauty as the name suggests is described as the most
beautiful girl in the Macondo over whom many men lost their mind and even died
for. But her character, a persona of simplicity, is what attracted me the most.
A couple of instances where this is displayed are
a. She cut her
hair bald fed up of tying it up.
b. She is
described to often walk naked without bothering about petticoats and cossets as
though she did not understand the concept of hiding her body.
Wrapping
up, in my opinion, reading this book is an experience, a unique one, that will
be different for different people. Though this is case for most books, this
novel goes much more into the depths of human life, meaning of its existence,
defining ego and self-love better than any other books I have experienced, and
therefore has volumes to talk to us.
Spoiler
alert……………………………………………………………
The end to
the novel is just as apt as it can be. At the end, Melanquide’s manuscript is successfully
translated and is shown to describe the rise and fall of Buendia family; and
the final paragraph just sums up the 400+ pages “The first of the line is
tied to a tree and the last one is being eaten by ants”
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