One Hundred Years of Solitude and Incest

I've renamed the book, and I think it's fitting.

This book delighted me at the beginning, made me a little tired of the sex in the middle, and delighted me again at the end. The book is sort of like a dream--you aren't really sure if what's happening is real or if it's happening only in the characters' minds (as things sometimes do in that novel).

From the first page and "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point," I was intrigued. When Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendia, who are cousins, marry, but she refuses to sleep with her husband because she's afraid that they will have a child with a pig's tail, her husband says, "I don't care if I have piglets as long as they can talk." And later: "If you bear iguanas, we'll raise iguanas." Hilarious!

Themes of incest, solitude, the deciphering of parchments, innovation, and repetition among generations are plentiful. The structure of the book is wonderful and all the pieces tie up in a satisfactory way (by this I mean that the foreshadowing in the novel always means something and it all comes together not in a way that is too easy, but in a way that makes sense). The depressing parts are not too depressing because they're so bizarre.

The men in the novel are warriors and/or lovers and/or mystical scholars. The women are mostly the ones who connect the men to the physical world--they keep the house, literally, from being overcome by nature--infringing ants and dust. They fight back nature in their attempt to civilize. Of course it's more complicated than this--not all of the women do this--some are just lovers, one floats up to heaven because she's so beautiful. But in general, it is the women who sew and clean. But this sewing and cleaning is invested with loads of meaning.

Of course, the religion and politics of the novel are interesting. But most interesting is its very loose and casual treatment of what is true and what is real. It is equally believable when Aureliano's 17 sons (all named Aureliano) get a cross of ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday that stick and won't come off and when the gypsies have a flying carpet as when Amaranta Ursala goes away to school and comes back loving fashion (okay, even here, she returns being able to predict in advance all developments in fashion--there is very little in this novel that is "normal").