LITERATURE: 100 Years – Catching up with Background

I laid this book aside a day, knowing that a war was imminent and both for need to prepare myself for battle here and in reality, as well as a decided lack of interest in the politics of yet another screwed-up country.

Marquez’s first line of 100 Years repeats itself in my head:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One hundred pages later, we find Aureliano a young widower in a time and village that is involved in unsettlement of government.  He is tied to the Conservatives though marriage, unguided by his father, who has managed (until his unfortunate breakdown and resultant life tethered to a tree) to keep the village he had founded fairly free of government till now, and disgusted both by the Conservative tampering of ballots and the Liberal thirst for blood of even those containing lesser pints, like children, Aureliano strikes out with an army of his own.  We cheer him on, for he seems to have found himself at last. 

And also at last, we find and place him back and forward in time by Marquez’s clever manipulation–and an unmatched sense of humor:

"Don Apolinar Moscote had trouble identifying that conspirator in high boots and with a rifle slung over his shoulder with the person he had played dominoes with until nine in the evening.

‘This is madness, Aurelito,’ he exclaimed.

‘Not madness," Aureliano said.  ‘War.  And don’t call me Aurelito any more.  Now I’m Colonel Aureliano Buendia.’ "

I turn the page to a new chapter:

"Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all.  He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five.  He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad.  he lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse."

"(…)He shot himself in the chest with a pistol and the bullet came out through his back without claiming any vital organs.  The only thing left of all that was a street that bore his name in Macondo.  And yet, as he declared a few years before he died of old age, he had not expected any of that on the dawn he left with his twenty-one men to join the forces of General Victorio Medina."

There you go.  We find out that nothing is what it seems to be.  The "discovered ice" was brought to this hot climate by a gypsy.  The firing squad that Aureliano faced on page one were lousy shots, I guess.  Not really false illusions pretentiously offered us by Marquez, but pictures we have decided on our own from his intriguing opening sentence.  Because we wrote the book, we can only laugh at ourselves for our mistakes in perception.

And isn’t that where Marquez excels in writing?  Perhaps I would feel cheated if this were the end of the Buendia story, but it is not.  There’s more–three hundred pages more to lure me onward.  And if I have come to accept the surrealism of parts of story, and if I have been misguided in my path by my own choosing, then shall I not proceed with ever more caution?