Thinking About: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It's been a few weeks since I finished Marquez’s Nobel Prize winning work, and often find myself drawing parallels with some of the author’s musings and my own life, wherein his words are able to better articulate my own thoughts – that’s how you know it’s good.

100 Years of Solitude is such a vast tapestry of the human experience, that every reader of the novel can reasonably draw their own meaning from it. To me, it reveals a great paradox of Marquez’s conception: the communicative power of mutual silence, the empathetic connection of shared solitude.

Throughout the story, following the lives of multiple characters and their interactions, this theme runs constant – there is a self hidden from all other individuals, one whose trials cannot be communicated and which no one can understand, because every outsider interprets them according to their own nature and experience. This is a distance shared by all, and its acknowledgement, instead of causing people to withdraw further into themselves, provides one of the most intimate connections humans can share, a mutual understanding of, and respect for, each other’s indiscernible private experiences.

It is a realization that, if accepted, brings people closer rather than distancing them, as it is perhaps the most reliable insight one can have into another’s thoughts.

The book explores countless other themes, of which one of my favorites is the layered and circumstantial representation of emotion, how experience enables one to grow out of some sentiments, and into others, as in comparison to certain feelings, others, previously all-consuming, appear almost trivial. A line that encapsulates this perfectly follows the final thoughts of colonel Aureliano Buendia, before he is shot by a firing squad, “it was in that moment that he realized how much he actually loved all the people he had hated”.

100 Years of Solitude has the ability to bridge that gap between the mundane and the grandiose, to reveal the enormity of the most minute occurrences, to illustrate the grand fabric of human existence embedded in circadian experiences.

-  Slop