Cien Años – Part One

I loved this novel right away. Having to read a significant portion of it in a short space of time in preparation for class allowed me to get completely involved in the shifting and expanding collection of characters, each one complex and multi-dimensional in their own right, as well as the richly described circumstances of their everyday lives. This is the first time that I have read a book in the genre of magical realism and I love the way that the fantastic is so seamlessly woven into the mundane. Márquez has constructed this world very subtly. The magical elements could easily affront our sense of reality but somehow they don’t – perhaps because we are taking cues from the characters who so casually engage with them. The distortion of time also adds an interesting element to the novel – sometimes I get the sense that it is elongated and other times collapsed – it is cyclical in the way that we re-encounter characters and events repeat themselves, but it is also measured in that we are always a certain distance away from those final moments before the firing squad.

Doubtlessly this work is highly revered and forms an important part of Colombian, and on a larger scale Latin American, cultural heritage. However, I came across the name of a movement not too long ago that, when I researched it further, revealed something problematic about this. McOndo (a wordplay on Macondo and McDonalds) is a recent literary movement in Latin America that seeks to distance itself from the tradition of magical realism. Supporters feel that magical realism has dominated Latin American literature at the expense of new forms of literary expression and contemporary thematic material. I’m sure that Jon would have something to say about this in his class on bad literature. It's not hard to make the connection between the popularization of magical realism on an international scale in the 60s and 70s and the demand for Latin American novels of stereotypically folkloric and exotic content in the market today. Perhaps we’ll discuss this later.

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