Alessandra Gass, Editor-in-Chief
@agasscourant
In my AP Literature class, I was recently tasked with reading 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Without much information on the book itself (not unlike other books I’ve read in previous English classes), I opened the cover and began reading. After getting through roughly five pages, I realized that I had no understanding of what I had just read.
I would later realize that this initial disorientation was not a failure of comprehension but my first encounter with the novel’s intentional warp of traditional notions of reality. 100 Years of Solitude refuses to be read like a typical Western novel; it defies the neat categorizations and systematic style of analysis we’re taught to follow in Advanced Placement courses. Instead, characters share the same names across generations, time moves both forward and backward, and magic / supernatural activity exists alongside daily life without explanation or justification.
After much torment, my breakthrough finally came when I went against my better judgement and stopped trying to understand what I was reading, allowing myself to surrender to the story’s flow. Instead of trying to track every detail and connection, I let myself experience the novel the way one might experience a dream – accepting each moment as it comes, without trying to force it into patterns or themes. The very qualities that had initially frustrated me (the cyclical nature of time, the blending of reality and fantasy, the family tree that seems to fold in on itself) revealed themselves as essential to the novel’s purpose as a magical realistic text upon the story’s conclusion.
Reading 100 Years of Solitude taught me that, sometimes, understanding comes not from imposing order but from embracing chaos. Marquez creates a world where memory is unreliable, where ice is a miracle, and where a character can ascend to heaven while folding laundry. These elements aren’t just outrageous for style’s sake: they’re a way to experience a different way of seeing the world, one that values wonder and inquiry over blatant explanation.
For students approaching this novel for the first time, I offer this piece of advice: don’t try to understand everything on your first read. Let go of the instinct to analyze every symbol and track every character. The details will sort themselves out, and what remains will be something more valuable than a “perfect” analysis – a sense of having experienced something magical.
While frustrating for readers even of the highest caliber, working through this text allows a broadening of linguistic, socioeconomic, and historical perspective. There were numerous occasions in which I wanted to slam the cover shut and halt my reading then and there; being in a state of constant confusion was uncomfortable for me, especially as someone who prides themself on being able to comprehend difficult literary material. However, trudging through this novel has completely altered the way in which I’ll approach all text in the future from an analytical standpoint, and has made me a more resilient reader and political thinker.
A few of my favorite quotes:
“On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them.”
“He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death…”
“For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”
