100 Years of Solitude

 Finishing Infinite Jest and Crime and Punishment and White Noise left me with a slight feeling of emptiness even beyond the requisite sadness of finishing a book. Each of these novels were monumental labors to read, unavoidable and inescapable in my mind, sublime to the point of impossibility, and hugely important to me. But as much as I would have liked, they could never be my favorite books. That position is held, forever, by One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I read the book in junior year of high school, as an unrequired text for my AP Literature class. I found an old copy at home and started to read because the title struck out to me from my memory, though indeterminately. After starting, I remembered my father reading aloud to me the first sentence in a Barnes & Noble when I was seven or eight, an experience weirdly echoing the line itself:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

I took it in slowly, feeling the book decompose in my hands. The front and back covers have fallen off since then. I remember telling everyone I could about the beauty of the writing. It's impossible to open the book and pick a random sentence and have it not be the most beautiful thing you've ever read, until you read the next sentence. And of course much has been said about the magic realism, the Kafkaesque way it makes the absurd seem more true than truth, at first making our world seem absurd for not being magical but then seem majestic because it is magical. And the unsubtly veiled allegory of Colombia and colonized South America perpetuating itself through time despite itself. All this, of course, is lovely and well and good.

What makes this monolithic to me is that it, more than any other work, makes clear the daily iniquity and suffering and terror implicit in every single facet of life, and that these are the most beautiful parts of life. And these are what makes life beautiful. “Makes clear” is clunky, though: “illustrates,” maybe, is better; or “reveals,” or “unwraps,” or “discovers.” It goes beyond the Four Noble Truths I'd been raised with from my father to insist that Life is Suffering But That's Extraordinary and Pretty Much What Makes It All Worth It. The fact that this had to be done in a magic realism idiom doesn't take away from its accomplishment or truth. Rather, it makes us feel lucky and reminded that there's nothing else to describe how our world works besides magic. By proving this in a poetic but narrative form, it states that art is the vehicle by which we embrace this magic, more than any other medium. Art is how we depict solitude but also how we escape it, the only real escape (besides love, but that's all that art is).

No matter how much any books in the future touch me, I don't think any could leave me feeling more in love with my world than Cien anos de soledad. Even Marquez's other works could only at best make me feel slightly diverted. My father showed me something more important than ice, he helped guide me to a book that elevated me to a true feeling of understanding with the beautiful horrific world I occupy.