ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This landmark classic tale of a Family surviving the ravages of outside interests trying to take control and devastate local society by uprooting , destroying and , finally , gouging out the soul from the centre of society using so called progress achieved permanent greatness by the use of the device termed Magic Realism.

The usage is not to be mistaken as having being invented by Marquez or , like the wheel , by any particular individual as such .The device was well used by Mikhail Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita in the late 20s and 30s , though the Book was suppressed under Stalin and only came out just about an year before One Hundred Years of Solitude.These earlier instances here and there in Europe tallied with the great movement in South American Painting at the time , especially in Argentina , of incorporating new techniques using traditional imagery that brought about an invigorating highly flowered inspiration across all expression of art , giving the South American artists the diction and confidence to express their own personality using local and traditional motifs remote from overtly European structures.

To Gabriel there is no particular magic to magic realism , but telling the stories as he heard from his Grandmother as a captivated mesmerised child.And i suppose that is what exceptional and the highest order of the craft of Magic realism and told by masters like Garcia is all about , tell it like your Grandma used to.

Marquez was quick and sharp to perceive the political links with the art moments of Magic realism in South America culminating in recognition to his work when he was warded the Nobel Prize.In the acceptance speech he astutely identified and stated :

Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home.

Read the full text of a dynamic and blistering indictment of internal and western attitudes to the social justice and political situation in the region HERE.

The real heroes of the Book are the Woman , they survive with their values and history intact whilst , all around , others are going about the business of losing their heads in various and imaginative guises from the run of the mill being shot in front of a firing squad , to the more identifiable privilege of being massacres in their places of slavery.

On page 205 we learn " the secret of old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude".And on page 370 " she became Human in her Solitude" can be seen as a lament to the plight of South America , now , like the Woman of the Book , turning into a spirit of hope rising from a stoic forbearing solitude and reclaiming the ultimate traditional right , that of being Human.