52 years of unparalleled writing.

Salman Rushdie unequivocally avows the following for this exceptional piece of work:

“The greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years”

And I won’t dare digress a whit from this statement. The insuperable amalgamation of magic and realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez endues to this novel is nothing less than an imperishable incantation. Moreover, the pain, the pleasure and especially the solitude as expounded in the novel seems so much realistic and every serious reader would have a predilection to fall into the cobwebs of Marquez’s unparalleled imagination.

This novel is for everyone. The contours of the book seem boundary-less for the books encompasses all sorts of human emotions. Be it obsession, love, discovery, pain, abhorrence, lust or envy, everything has a special place in this figment of Marquez’s ingenious thought. And above all nothing can be as incisive to a reader as is the pain of solitude that Marquez has imbued his characters in. The most intriguing thing about the story is that there is no convoluted plot, no hidden subterfuge and no awe-inspiring ruses but the mere reality of the human life and how we all evolve to fall slowly but certainly into the abyss of solitude. Besides that, there is no protagonist in the whole story. Every character is special for every person in the story no much how much extraneous he/she seems to appear in the inception, is indispensable and goads out a wide range of different feelings in the character.

The simplicity of the story is the first thing that will catch you eye. It seems to belong to us all, it has human desires and concocted fantasies, it foments emotions and sometimes also shows how much impassive and nonchalant the world can be. Also, one more thing that truly corroborates Marquez’s exception story-telling ability is his deft virtuosity at maneuvering your emotions. The thing that stupefied me most was that the author has indited the plot in such a way that he can make you loathe or love a character at his whim, whenever he wants he can give you reasons to deplore one particular characters and just after turning some more pages, he can give you substantial reasons to feel sympathy and love for the same character. Such is the greatness of Marquez’s writing that we you end reading the novel, your arbitration skills at judging the characters of the actors will be clobbered and what will be left will be serene reverence for Marquez and a feeling of melancholy making you realize the harshness and asperity of solitude.

Nobel Prize in Literature (1982) winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Solitude, as obvious from the title, is the most significant theme of the whole book. Every character here is condemned to solitude throughout his life. And here Marquez takes out a very vital issue. Solitude as per Marquez’s characters is not the absence of people around, solitude is not being solitary but solitude is being so much indifferent to others and that we stop living itself. None of the character is the novel is living, they are all surviving and compounded by their great life expectancy, all of them are living lives of complete solitude. Every person has immured himself in solitary confinement and sheer breakdown in their life generates pathos in the mind of the every reader. Yet in between we find glimpses of realism where we realize that we too as part of this techno-savvy generation are part of the same canker. In this age of technology, we have so many ‘friends’, yet no one to talk to; we have so many who know us, yet no one who understands us; so many who meet us, yet no one to share our feelings; so many who talk with us, yet no one who believes in us. This sheer similarity between Marquez’s magnum opus truly invokes a sense of profound respect for the deceased author. It seems as if this 1967’s novel could peep into this 21^st century’s melee and taunt us all with its sharp similarity to the present day world. All of us today are feeling the pain of solitude that has been edified in the book. Just as the advent of new technologies in Macondo village (fictional village where the whole plot is set) widened the cleft between people so is the present rise of the technological juggernaut is doing to the current generation. Our geographical and spatial distances have been curtailed to a great extent, yet our emotional distances have developed deep chasms. On one hand, we have made communication possible, yet on the other hand we are excommunicating ourselves from the world. Our basic lifestyle has unskeptically ameliorated, but whether the quality of our life has followed the same trend is a question worth musing. Technology is not the culprit here, in fact, we are the ones who are banishing ourselves from the world. We too have transfixed ourselves just like Marquez’s characters and this engenders in every reader a feeling of grave poignancy.

The downright analogy between ours and Macondo’s time is enough to horripilate any conscientious reader. One thing to learn from Macondo would be that it is high time we rectified ourselves otherwise the same fatalism and perdition that ensued for Macondo would follow the suit for our own society. We need to accept that human being can’t survive alone and the way we are confining ourselves would one day do nothing less than asphyxiating us through our own hands and then when we will decipher the whole code in the end, it would be a lost cause (just like Aureliano’s) and a hurricane would blow everything away.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI