Blog Post #7 - 100 Years of Solitude

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is a confusing book. It starts out describing the village of Macondo and it's inhabitants. It specifically zeroes in on the Buendía family and their impact on the town. José Arcadio Buendía is the main character (I thought) at first and he is obsessed with inventions and discovering new things. His wife, Úrsula Iguarán, is mainly keeping their home together and also runs a candy shop. They also have two kids who do not stay kids very long in the book. Instead, Aureliano and José Arcadio quickly become adults and marry. Amaranta, their daughter, and Rebeca their adopted daughter also shoot to adulthood (or at least teenage years) pretty early on.
As the book progresses is clear that the different chapters are not in chronological order. The fact that events in this book are not in order is interesting, but it is also seen that the character's interpretation of memories and time is off too. This stood out to me the most when the whole town got insomnia. Not only is it strange that the entire town gets insomnia and doesn't sleep for over 50 days (which is impossible), but they also lose their memories of almost everything, including the names of regular objects. This part was intriguing because it's almost scary that the town forgets the names of everything and what they have to do in their daily life (like milk the cows). What if they forgot that they even had insomnia and memory loss and just never recovered?
Eventually, Melquíades arrives and cures José Arcadio Buendía of insomnia and memory loss, and then whole town also recovers. But the crazy thing is, Melquíades is supposed to be dead. And;

"he really had been through death, but he returned because he could not bear the solitude. Repudiated by his tribe, having lost all of his supernatural faculties because of his faithfulness to life, he decided to take refuge in that corner of the world which had still not been discovered by death" (49).

First of all, it is not possible to just choose to come back to life. Which at first made me think that by death they mean something else, like he went away and they said he was dead because he didn't really exist in their town. But also, it's mentioned that Macondo had not been "discovered" by death yet. Which could mean that everyone was just young when they moved and hadn't reach an age of natural death. However, the man that José Arcadio Buendía killed with a spear haunted their home, so maybe ghosts exist? Another option, which I tried to understand on Sparknotes, is that the town's perception of time is odd. And that these memories could exist to them all at once. Overall, I think the idea of time and memory in this book is perplexing, and I am still trying to figure it out. But it could be a way of showing how everyone's lives were lived and how their town came to be.