LITERATURE: 100 Years – Finale

I liked it.  It was a good book. 

This two or three hours’ sleep sucks big time.  Yes, I have finished 100 Years, but I need go back because the pace picked up, the thirst for closure overtook my patient analytical ways.  Some great stuff that needs to be separated out and studied, though history, decay and human love is foremost in the theme, as is, of course, that certain solitude we each may seek and produce for ourselves.  And that’s what I cannot as easily decide–the theme, the story as a whole instead of broken down in pieces as I’ve done for the past month.  There is so much to learn, so much to turn around and twist and pull and settle back in place.  Even this, a Marquez poke at literature and education:

"In the lethargy of her pregnancy, Amaranta Ursula tried to set up a business in necklaces made out of the backbones of fish.  But except for Mercedes, who bought a dozen, she could not  find any customers.  Aureliano was aware for the first time that his gift for languages, his encyclopedic knowledge, his rare faculty for remembering the details of remote deeds and places without having been there, were as useless as the box of genuine jewelry that his wife owned, which must have been worth as much as all the money that the last inhabitants of Macondo could have put together." (p. four-thirty-eight)

For me, the backbones of fish call back the beginning of the journey, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s trek to find the sea.  The skeleton of fish reveals the loss of not only flesh (the dead) but water.  The backbone, the spine, the structure that not only holds all together in life, but remains beyond death.  Macondo?  The spirit of Buendia?  The past, picked clean by the generations of the living?

And, Aureliano’s years of study of language to enable him to read the parchments of Melquiades become as useless as the box of genuine jewelry his wife owned.  Is the knowledge gained useless unless shared, discussed and argued, maybe proven, as Aureliano used it briefly among the bookseller and his friends?  Genuine jewelry would lead me to believe it does indeed have value, and yet it’s lost without either the growing of it, or if it represents the future, or the world outside of Macondo, does it remain although Macondo turns to dereliction and dust?

There’s more, much more that I must sort through; reading and deciphering the pages as if they were the writings of Melquiades.