Only the lonely

This Sunday saw the end of one book and the start of another.
It also saw, once again the realisation that books do give me so much comfort and joy. One of the great things about books is that they give you a glimpse of something new and different at your fingertips without having to leave your home. You can explore someone else's world and imagination whenever you want, at your own pace, in a way that suits you. You can even bring your pyamas to the party if you want to. A book will not care one hoot about the laundry that is stacking up, the dishes that need to be done or the fact that you should probably more sociable and go to that party that you said you might go to.
Sometimes it feels like I could be stranded on an deserted island somewhere and that my books would be enough company to see me through any crisis I would need to face. Do not get me wrong I love people. I love watching people go by on a busy street and think of where they have been or are going. I love observing what people get up to when they think they are not observed. I could spend an entire holiday sitting somewhere sipping coffee and wondering about the people passing me by and imagining what their lives are like.. but books are not bad either.


#### SPOILER ALERT ####


One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This book is on the 100 books list of the BBC so I can cross of one of that lengthy reading list. It is also one that I have had lying around for a while and have thought of reading and then decided against it and then thought of reading and then again decided against it. I think I did this because perhaps I thought it was going to be all serious for some reason. It is.. and it isn't. I find it hard to think of the book as just a series of characters thrown together into a story. Just recounting their story in this review would not really serve the complexity of the characters very well and I would rather give you my impressions. This book made me think about other books I have read and how it contrast to them but more of that later. I hope that mr Marquez will forgive me for abbreviating him to GGM in this review.
Since finishing it earlier today I have wondered about the title more than anything. I am not sure I quite get it? I think I do, but I am not sure.. it might be one of those ones open for multiple interpretations. The story itself is vast and stretches over many years (could even be a hundred years!!) and many generations of the same family. The whole book feels vast! There is much in the chapters than what he is GGM is giving you and you feel that in between the pages and around the characters that you are given there is much more to be discovered. That is the beauty of the book really. It almost drowns you in this family chronicle of many characters that all living the same place for most of their lives. There are some family members that manage to escape Macondo but essentially Macondo is the place where the family begins and ends and where all the most important things happen. The richness in the story does not come from various locations, exotic destinations or travel. It comes from the characters, from the family and how they interact with one another. I guess that the "solitude" of the title could be applicable to the characters. For the fact that they all live in the same village, most of them in the same house for most of the time and yet most of them are alone in their own little world and deal with their own worries and woes. They seem to live beside one another but not always with each other.
In essence the book is a family chronicle of the Buendia family. You get a sort of chronological account of how the family was started and who married who and how the relationships work or do not. At times it is a complated story as many of the family member get given the same name and time is not exactly linear but goes through a few diversions and re-routes along the way. You can be reading a chapter dealing with the life of one of characters when someone else is mentioned and then you get some of their life being retold but at a  different time from when you started the chapter. GGM goes back and forth through time and switches the focus between different characters. He will talk about different times in people's live inside the same chapter. He will mention someone as being dead at the start of one chapter and bring them back to life in the tale of another family member's life in the next chapter. This means that as a reader you have to be on your toes and try to follow who is still there when you are in the chapter thet you are in. At times it makes it hard to follow the story line of the book. Towards the end you realise that it does not matter too much as by the end of the book everyone ends up dead anyway and the family dynasty has ended for good.
In a way you are as the last Aurelio is on the final few pages of the book. You have been reading the history of a family that is at times disjointed and skips ahead an back in time while you know that the end is inevitable.
Another thing that I found was that when reading the story you feel that there is something unreal going on. That the world that these characters live in is not quite like ours. Their lives are much more simple and restricted to ours nowadays. Things happen to these people that do not happen to us. Some are followed around but butterflies, some have relationships that seem the influence the state of their livestock, some women seem to know more that they should, one of the matriarchs of the family goes blind without anyone noticing and yet she sees more than any of them. There is a feeling of something other worldly going on at times... as if it is another world they live in.
Most of the family members live to a very old age, some die young some die a virgin death, some start revolutions that never amount to anything. They all live in their little village and wait for the world to come and find them. Perhaps because they live only in Macondo they are amazed by the outside world and the wonders that it has to give them. Fist of this is through the visits of the gypsies, later on the railway finds them and even a big banana plantation comes to town. The family has some strange practices and some strange ways of dealing with problems. Sometimes you cannot help but feel sorry for their ignorance of the modern world and their reluctance to accept change. On the other hand you feel that all they are trying to do is to hang onto what they know and believe in. They are trying to hold on to the power of their family and their beliefs. However, in the end progress is what does them in. Outsiders come and destroy the community, even try to destroy the family. The village survives (sort of) but it is never the way it was and slowly but surely things fall apart more and more until it all ends with the last two family members, their little boy with a pigtail (after Ursula warned them!!!) and a house that is falling apart around them.
I also found that the style of this book is very different from what I am used to. Most English / American / European writers that I have ready are more stripped down than GGM. The way GGM weaves his story is back and forth and that is unusual. I guess that when you read a detective story you tend to get an event and then we get the whodunnit. With a Koontz you get an event and things spiral from there - you focus on what happened and then find out how it fits together. You find out bits and pieces of information and piece them together to get to the end. You tend to get a story from A to B and perhaps a stop off at C in the middle and some back story. But the feel of it is more down to earth, stripped down and realistic. It is not that the language GGM he uses is more lyrical I think it is just the way he tells the story that is different and the underlying suggestion of something else, possibly not natural but supernatural going on that makes the difference.
Are the characters entertaining and gripping? Yes, most definitely. I have never met a better bunch of characters that are weird and wonderful and yet are normal human beings with normal hopes and fears.
Is it at times confusing and hard to follow the storyline? Yes.
Is it worth is in the end? Yes.. oooh yes. It is a rich story in style of writing and characters and is definitely worth a read.


Author: Gabriel Gracia Marquez.
Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
422 pages
Penguin Books
ISBN nr 0-14-027876-1

Books to be read: 71