Re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude

My reading challenge for 2020 is re-reading twenty-five books that I read fifty years ago and never re-read again. I have chosen books that were important, life-changing, books I discussed with my friends. It's a mixture of very high-brow and trash (that at the time I didn't know was trash).

I recently re-read The Glass Bead Game, but I had re-read it between then and now, so it doesn't count. I decided to start with One Hundred Years of Solitude because I had been planning to re-read it for a while, and I had to start somewhere. It was, again, one of those books everyone in my vicinity read at the same time when it was published in Russia. Everyone talked about it. It was like nothing else we had read. It was probably one of the very first Latin American authors translated into Russian, and I wonder why.

I had very vague memory of the book. I remembered the old man sitting forever under a tree. I remembered generations of men with the same names. I remembered that the very last couple has a baby with a pig's tail. I also remembered the weirdness, the strange flow of time which we subsequently learned was associated with the concept of magical realism. I was obsessed with time then – as now – so it made a deep impression on me, precisely because it was seemingly realism, and still not quite, always with a twist.

I did not remember that so much of the novel is about war and politics. I did not remember that the characters died suddenly and their death was mentioned in passing as something insignificant. I did not remember that the baby with the pig's tail is eaten by ants. I did not remember that the town of Macondo is sinking into total decay.

I found the novel exceptionally boring. It took me several weeks to finish, and on many occasions I would tell myself that I was too tired to read. If it hadn't been part of my challenge I would have put it aside. I could not relate to the characters, possibly apart from a couple of women that at least had some personality. I don't mind novels where nothing happens, but then they need to offer something else. This novel didn't offer me much else. I wonder what exactly was so attractive fifty years ago. Maybe just that it wasn't like anything we had read before. I also suspect that I read it quickly, skimming rather than reading deeply.

There were, however, some aspects I enjoyed, few and far between. The characters dying casually is one. It is a powerful narrative feature. The reader gets invested in a character (well, to a certain degree in my case), and then they suddenly are no more. I loved the way the word "solitude" appeared every now and then, just to remind me of the theme. I loved the prolepses, flashforwards, like the opening of the novel, saying “Many years later...” I don't think I appreciated this fifty years ago, perhaps didn't even notice. I loved the ending, also something I had totally forgotten: metafiction, the book within the book. It was worth suffering through the endless boring pages.

It is not surprising that I read differently now from when I was seventeen, because I am now a professional reader, damaged by the analytical toolkit I cannot ignore as I read. Yet the novel is still praised at one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. Why do I fail to recognise its greatness today? Of course, as I always tell my students, not all books are for everyone, and we should not be ashamed to admit that we don't like something that “everybody” likes. Still I wonder what I liked fifty years ago. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe I bluffed. Maybe everyone I knew bluffed.