Dude. Gross.

Wow. I have just experienced one of the most disturbingly grotesque sentences in my literary lifetime, detailing a father(Aureliano) looking over his garden while searching for his newborn son: “ …he admired the persistence of the spiderwebs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn. And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden” (445). The mental image of a dead newborn baby being dragged by ants into their holes stuck with me throughout the rest of the book, leading me to gloss over the last several pages. Long after I put the book down, still sitting on my sofa, a chill ran down my spine to my feet, then back up again to my stomach. But somehow, I wasn’t exactly surprised.

Such is the power of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His imagery goes from beautiful to utterly horrific in the width of a period; his writing reflects the sudden, awful aspects of his characters’ lives. For instance, the happy promise found in the arrival of Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s seventeen sons is sharply contrasted with the eventual murder of all of them. The exhilaration of the workers’ strike is followed by the horrendous massacre of thousands of the same workers and their families. The gorgeous Remedios the Beauty, whose very presence horribly kills her suitors. In my opinion, the most horribly cruel event in the novel was the shooting and subsequent paralysis of Mauricio Babilonia, Meme’s lover, who is “mistaken” for a chicken thief: “He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest, without a single moment of betrayal, tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies, who did not give him a moment’s peace, and ostracized as a chicken thief” (313). The novel merely cycles the same effective plot device: a good episode, shortly followed by a disastrous event that eclipses the previous good episode and must be followed by another good incident. In this way, reading the novel becomes reminiscent of drowning in a depressing, melancholic ocean that is occasionally interrupted by a frantic gasp for redeeming air. Just when the reader thinks that the novel couldn’t be any darker, a someone else suddenly dies. It is a relentless, harsh novel detailing the rises and falls of one extremely unlucky family.

In making his novel an unending deluge of misfortune and sorrow, Marquez achieves several remarkable effects on the reader. For one, he made me glad that I’m not a Buendia. Secondly, in dehumanizing us through such unremitting catastrophe and really weird, incestual relations(!), Marquez shows us just how lucky we are, and even made this reader grateful for all that has not befallen him. And by the end of the novel, this makes us even more human: call it a humble pie made up of death, insanity, and a big slice of sexual perversion. (514)