One Hundred Years of Solitude (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Mexican novelist and critic Carlos Fuentes was amazed by the first three chapters of One Hundred Years of Solitude that García Márquez sent him for review. Once published, the novel was snatched up by the public, selling out its first printing within a week. Critics were on their feet, fellow novelists took their caps off, and everyone wanted to talk to García Márquez about the story. Printers could not keep up with the demand for what Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called, in a March 1970 issue of Time, "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." American novelist William Kennedy similarly wrote in the National Observer that the book "is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."

Early reviews of the novel were almost uniformly positive, with praise for the author's skill and style. Paul West, in the Chicago Tribune Book World, observed that the novel "feeds the mind's eye non-stop, so much so that you soon begin to feel that never has what we superficially call the surface of life had so many corrugations and configurations. So I find it odd that the blurb points to 'the simplicity ' [of the writing]." Paradoxical as it may seem, many commentators agreed. García Márquez's delivery is so elegantly crafted that despite being bombarded by information, the reader simply wants more. For West, the novel is "a verbal Mardi Gras" that is "irresistible." Given this type of exuberance, the crusty review by D. J. Enright, in The Listener, is striking. He found the depiction of civil war and the thud of rifle butts upsetting. He noted that "these are no happy giants or jolly grotesques" and added that "the book is hardly comic." He concluded by calling the novel a "slightly bloated avatar of the austere [Argentinean writer] Jorge Luis Borges."

In contrast, New York Times critic John Leonard stated that the novel is not only delightful, it is relevant. "It is also a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience," he observed. "Macondo is Latin America in microcosm." He then compared the author with other great writers, including Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita) and German Gunter Grass (author of The Tin Drum). Other reviewers have compared García Márquez to a whole range of writers, the most prominent of which is American Nobel laureate William Faulkner. Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County is similar in scope and depth to García Márquez's Macondo. In addition, the comparison of the Buendías to other famous families started with the Karamazovs of Dostoevsky and Faulkner's Sartoris clan, and moved to the family of black humorist Charles Addams.

In addition to receiving praise for its individual virtues, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been hailed for its role in alerting the world to the literature and culture of Latin America. In reflecting on Latin American enthusiasm for the novel, New York Review of Books contributor Jack Richardson stated that it is "as if to suggest that the style and sensibility of their history had at last been represented by a writer who understands their particular secrets and rhythms."

While attention has been given to the novel's historical relevance, most criticism has focused on its technical aspects. Writing in Diacritics, Ricardo Gullon explained how the novel demonstrates the author's technical mastery: García Márquez's "need to tell a story is so strong that it transcends the devices he uses to satisfy that need. Technique is not a mere game; it is something to be made use of." Another aspect of the author's technique was noted by Gordon Brotherston in his The Emergence of the Latin American Novel The novel often, and not always in flattering ways, refers to other novels. In doing so, the world of literature is made more real and the real world made literature.

The use of myth in the novel provides another opportunity for critical comment. Roberto González Echevarría, in Modern Language Notes, explained the ease of mythmaking in Latin America. He noted that the key to the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel's awareness of the way the New World was "written into existence" through chronicles of the first European settlers. The Spanish crown gathered these eyewitness accounts into a huge archive begun by King Charles V. Echevarría points out the references García Márquez makes to these chronicles, as well as the resultant self-reflexivity imposed on the reader that is only exaggerated by the last scene. His conclusion is that, "In terms of the novel's ability to pass on cultural values [though] it is impossible to create new myths, [we are brought] back once and again to that moment where our desire for meaning can only be satisfied by myth."

Academics have written on the novel precisely because García Márquez is capable of doing what others have failed to do. Gene H. Bell-Villada writes, in From Dante to García Márquez, that García Márquez is able to do for the banana strike what Tolstoy did for Napoleon's invasion of Russia. For example, he avoided "a serious flaw of [Miguel Angel] Asturias's banana trilogy" by not including a Yankee protagonist. Instead, he presented silent Yankee caricatures. The closest he comes is a "rare utterance" from Mr. Brown "relayed to us secondhand, via an unreliable source." Bell-Villada then continues to examine the ways in which the facts of the banana strike are actually used in the novel — even if stretched a little.

When Bell-Villada interviewed García Márquez for Boston Review, he told him that his novel is required reading for many political science courses in the United States. García Márquez responded that he was not aware of this, but he was startled to see his book listed in a bibliography for an academic study of Latin America by the French economist Rene Dumont. When asked about the strike scene, García Márquez noted that people now allude to "the thousands who died in the 1928 strike." Wistfullly, he added, "As my Patriarch says: it doesn't matter if something isn't true, because eventually it will be!"