Books: Orchids and Bloodlines

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa. 422 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

Gabriel Garcia Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast. "Nothing interesting has happened to me since," he has said. His experiences there were eventually transformed into a tenderly comic novel, just published in the U.S. after three years of enormous success in Latin America. It has survived export triumphantly. In a beautiful translation, surrealism and innocence blend to form a wholly individual style. Like rum calentano, the story goes down easily, leaving a rich, sweet burning flavor behind.

Flying Carpets. Outwardly the book is a picaresque saga of the extraordinary Buendia family in Macondo, the town they helped to found more than a century ago in the dense Colombian lowlands. Pioneer settlers from a foothills town, José Arcadio Buendia and Úrsula, his wife-cousin, start with nothing but the vehemence of their blood. They soon make Macondo into a strange oasis in the orchid-filled jungle, a primitive, otherworldly place resonant with songbirds, where there is no death, no crime, no law, no judges. The only outside visitors are gypsies, who astound the residents with magnets, false teeth, telescopes, ice and a flying carpet.

First civil war, then a railroad and a huge, U.S.-owned banana plantation gradually penetrate the town's isolation and open it to dissension and prosperity. Six generations of Buendias, all touched with fantasy and fatalism, all condemned to fundamental solitude, are born and die, often violently. Just before the family line ends in disaster, Macondo is almost abandoned, the banana farms destroyed by nearly five years of rain. Only the red-light district remains active. Finally, an inexplicable cyclone erases the town and the family.

The Buendia men are introverted, impulsive, richly eccentric. José Arcadio, the founding father, all common sense when it comes to law or town design, is lured into alchemy and other esoteric sciences; he tries to use a daguerreotype machine to find the invisible player of his pianola. One of his sons, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, becomes a revolutionary leader who organizes 32 armed uprisings against a distant and corrupt "government." He loses them all, but wins the war—only to lose the peace. Aureliano II is a roistering spendthrift who takes on all comers in eating contests. He falls only once, comatose with turkey, in a four-day duel with a fastidious lady known as "the Elephant."

Garcia Márquez's women are magnificent. Stern, stoic, preserved by duty and the dynastic urge, they struggle to keep their men sane. The primal mother Ursula, even at the age of 100, is so sure of her ways that no one realizes she is blind.

Reduced to essences, the exotic Buendias become immediate—yet mythically compelling like Tolstoy's Rostov family, or the doomed scions of Faulkner's Sartoris. But One Hundred Years is more than a family chronicle. The author is really at work on an imaginative spiritual history of any or all Latin American communities. In the process, he fondly reveals more about the Latin soul than all Oscar Lewis' selective eavesdropping does.