Deeper meaning to One Hundred Years of Solitude

[Anonymous No.20909793]

I finished this book a few months back, and while I enjoyed it a lot, I feel like a lot of the deeper meanings and themes in the book went over my head. Everything I can find about it says that the Buendia family is meant to be a microcosm of Colombian history, but again, entirely in ways I don't understand, like the house the Buendias live in being representative of the upper class. Can any Colombian/more enlightened anons lend me a hand here.

[Anonymous No.20909831]

My impression when I read it was that I was witnessing humanity first emerging from primordial mud, from the creamy swamps of stone age, as if the foundation of the city of Macondo was the first settlement of civilization and its inhabitants were all Adams and Eves, all of them still humid with the sweat of the dew of paradise. It's like the children of Eden modelling and pilling up the first bricks of Ur or Uruk, of Nineveh or Babylon (all the houses of red mud and of bamboo/taquara).

Humanity was at the same time more innocent and stronger, more ignorant and hungrier. The friendship and the butchery, the marriage and drinking rituals, the sexual hunger and the love caresses, the trades and crafts and arts and festivals: all of it seemed, in my eyes, as discovered for the first time by the inhabitants of the world of this book. When they made love, they did it with more power and pleasure than our current race; when they killed, they did it with more foaming savagery. Their veins still had primeval magma snaking and tingling inside them; their arteries still burned with an effervescence contaminated with the sweat of minotaur’s and the menstrual blood of sirens. It is a book that portrays a period in history but with the taste of something that came before history, before civilization, before the written word, before the invention of time. The first settlers, with the first house-foundations, will be the ones who will finally make time open its eyes and start growing conscious – as if, the soil being perforated to seat the first beams, time started to gush off, like newfound petroleum.

It begins with creation. Even the fauna and flora, with plants with tick and oozing blood of milk, flowers with golden pollen, butterflies and mosquitos emerging like dense fog, and the birds singing on the branches, the tamarins jumping from tree to tree, the fat salamanders crawling in the viscous vegetation, the araras (macaws) whose flesh is blue and taste like musk: this environment seemed as the original jungles of Eden before the fall of humanity. It begins with creation, but it will march inexorably until the crack of doom.

1/2

[Anonymous No.20909837]

>>20909831
And then you get the same errors and weaknesses happening again and again and again, by generation after generation of characters, as if didn’t matter how much civilization changed, for the original and primeval world (where things still didn’t have a name, where men and women needed to point to indicate what they were referring to) could never be completely silenced. No matter how much technology and “progress” fertilized the world, still the original marrow of our bestial beings could never be suppressed: it kept screaming inside the bones and veins of the men and women of the book. Like the sweet and nauseating pulp of guava, there is no way to wash the taste, the nausea and the sweetness from this the people who are still and forever tattooed by the Dionysian stamp of the state-of-nature.

So this:

a) The sperm of Adam could never be dissolved from our species; the perfume of the apple never gagged, for it is forever entangled in our flesh: that seems to me one of the great themes of the book.

b) Somehow I feel that the author desired to portray the whole history of humanity – from the first shadows that crawled from the marshes of Eden (the slimy early-fishes creeping from sea to land), to the last cries of the last infants and the last whispers of the last ancients (whose backs carry the weight of all the thousands that lived before them) – occurring in one single town, during the course of mere one hundred years.

It’s a great book.

2/2

[Anonymous No.20910092]

>>20909793
Hmm, I enjoyed the book particularly because I wasn't looking for any particular meanings and didn't try to decipher a single thing.
There were interesting parts.. it's like you meet an old person that just rambles on a bit about life and they something that's.. profound? Then they wave their hand at what they just said and continue rambling on or go away. To me the book is akin to a dream since I mostly retain visual memory of what I read.
Gabo is one of my favourite authors precisely because I just let the text flow without looking for any meanings. If some meaning feels natural enough, it just emerges but I don't stop and think over anything there. Same with his short stories.
I know this doesn't add much to your look for specific meanings. I'll just stand on the opposite shore then and show that sometimes the shore is a shore and boat is a boat, and people that ramble on are people that ramble on, with some glimpses of sense and some glimpses of non-sense.
What other stuff have you read by Gabo?

[Anonymous No.20910118]

>>20909793
It's great mistake to reduce the story of the Buendia family to that of the south america history, let alone colombian history.
Thinking this particular aspect enriches the novel is expected from propagandists and activists, not from serious literature enthusiasts.
The book is not a retelling of the Genesis. Is a much simpler story about coming to terms with the past rejection of our ignorance.
Nature and society were already discovered and invented but the characters refuse to acknowledge this.
Such act can't last forever. That's where they focus on themselves instead and translate the vicious nature of their engagement with their world to each other leading up to a incestious relationship with one another (as if they didn't know or cared they were related by blood).

[Anonymous No.20910435]

>>20910092
>>20910118
Thank you for your insights. I guess what I got out of it was mostly what you guys are talking about, I just assumed there was more to it since I always heard people referring to it as the whole history of Colombia through one family. Also, for >>20910092 specifically, I have read nothing else by Gabo. I'll probably read No One Writes to the Colonel next.

[Anonymous No.20910445]

>>20910435
>I'll probably read No One Writes to the Colonel next.
Good choice.