One Hundred Years of Solitude and the futility of human enterprise

Highly recommended by every single person who's read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this piece of surreal literature is undoubtedly so worth your time if you ever decide to pick it up. Usually when I start to write out a review about any book it is either something that I have a lot to say about or it is something that has blown my mind. This book is neither. Neither is it something that I can't stop gushing over nor is it something that I have a firm constructed opinion on. But this is one book that has made me feel too much. It's something that has made me connect with 'it' and not with its characters. Never have I felt something moving for a book without feeling something for its character(s). Maybe it was the frame of my own head when I picked up this book, maybe it was my early quarter-life existence creating an enigmatic mesh to create meaning where there really was no deep meaning. Whatever it was, there's no denying that I plummeted into a deep dark unknown and didn't know how to crawl back for quite sometime; before my natural upbeatness (not sure if that's a legit word) turned things upright for me. And thank goodness for that!

One Hundred Years of Solitude circles around generations of Buendía family - like a flying predator eyeing its land bound prey, sometimes upclose with the magnified precision that only physical proximity can bring and sometimes with the hazy obscurity of distance. I say circle because, man, circle it does. It's the same frigging mistakes, the same fate brought about these mistakes, over and over again. Through all the familiar themes of love, longing, jealousy, revenge, Marquez makes one theme abundantly clear - that it will end where it all started, that it will eventually come full circle. It has to, it's the natural order of things. I won't talk about the plot much because really there's nothing much to it anyway. I will instead talk about how this book made me feel, the myriad of emotions that cushioned my fall from my surrounding reality into this realm where both the rational and the fantastical could exist in relentless harmony. A realm where garish radiance is dull but unadorned monochrome is blinding, where jarring cacophony is soothing but pure silence is deafening. Yes, it's that kind of a book - fills your head with all sorts of ideas and then makes you cripplingly uncomfortable with your own thoughts. You wonder why you get up at sun-up and snore at sun-down, you wonder why you need to make the trudge to your routine job everyday when you can survive even without it, you wonder with eyes wide open in the middle of the day and you wonder in the deepest recess of slumber, you wonder and wonder and just continue wondering till you either snap from the pressure of it or you learn to be comfortable with your thoughts, all by yourself.

More than the wonder, it's the doubtful color with which it paints everything you had so far taken for granted that is unnerving. The fatal destiny of each Buendía, the continuous struggle against this destiny and the premonition which Marquez builds in your head foreshadowing the futility of this struggle will either unhinge you or make you better equipped to handle Solitude. Let's hope it's the latter. 

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