Orchids and Bloodlines

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa. 422 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast. "Nothing interesting has happened to me since," he has said. His experiences there were eventually transformed into a tenderly comic novel, just published in the U.S. after three years of enormous success in Latin America. It has survived export triumphantly. In a beautiful translation, surrealism and innocence blend to form a wholly individual style. Like rum calentano, the story goes down easily, leaving a rich, sweet burning flavor behind.

Flying Carpets. Outwardly the book is a picaresque saga of the extraordinary Buendia family in Macondo, the town they helped to found more than a century ago in the dense Colombian lowlands. Pioneer settlers from a foothills town, Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula, his wife-cousin, start with nothing but the vehemence of their blood. They soon make Macondo into a strange oasis in the orchid-filled jungle, a primitive, otherworldly place resonant with songbirds, where there is no death, no crime, no law, no judges. The only outside visitors are gypsies, who astound the residents with magnets, false teeth, telescopes, ice and a flying carpet.

First civil war, then a railroad and a huge, U.S.-owned banana plantation gradually penetrate the town's isolation and open it to dissension and prosperity. Six generations of Buendias, all touched with fantasy and fatalism, all condemned to fundamental solitude, are born and die, often violently. Just before the family line ends in disaster, Macondo is almost abandoned, the banana farms destroyed by nearly five years of rain. Only the red-light district remains active. Finally, an inexplicable cyclone erases the town and the family.

The Buendia men are introverted, impulsive, richly eccentric. Jose Arcadio, the founding father, all common sense when it comes to law or town design, is lured into alchemy and other esoteric sciences; he tries to use a daguerreotype machine to find the invisible player of his pianola. One of his sons, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, becomes a revolutionary leader who organizes 32 armed uprisings against a distant and corrupt "government." He loses them all, but wins the war--only to lose the peace. Aureliano II is a roistering spendthrift who takes on all comers in eating contests. He falls only once, comatose with turkey, in a four-day duel with a fastidious lady known as "the Elephant."

Garcia Marquez's women are magnificent. Stern, stoic, preserved by duty and the dynastic urge, they struggle to keep their men sane. The primal mother Ursula, even at the age of 100, is so sure of her ways that no one realizes she is blind.

Reduced to essences, the exotic Buendias become immediate--yet mythically compelling like Tolstoy's Rostov family, or the doomed scions of Faulkner's Sartoris. But One Hundred Years is more than a family chronicle. The author is really at work on an imaginative spiritual history of any or all Latin American communities. In the process, he fondly reveals more about the Latin soul than all Oscar Lewis' selective eavesdropping does.

Indeed, the whole enchanted continent, originally colonized by white men in pursuit of El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, is encapsulated in Macondo. The only trace of the Protestant ethic in the town is the operation of the U.S banana company--and the "gringos" are plainly mean, greedy, and probably crazy too. The Buendias, on the other hand, are inspired mainly by the magic in life. They see no limit of human potential, mostly because natural miracles abound--a plague of insomnia, showers of dead birds or yellow flowers, the arrival of death as a lady in blue. When Remedies Buendia (whose beauty and musky odor drive men mad) suddenly ascends to heaven while folding sheets, her sister-in-law merely grumbles that the sheets, which also rose, are lost forever.

For all its range and length, the book is satisfyingly cohesive where it might be sprawling. The key to this unity is Garcia Marquez's treatment of time. Consider the superb opening sentence: "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." Such compression of time makes the novel taut with a sense of fate. Atavistic dictates of blood must be followed. Premonitions invariably come true. A series of coded predictions, written when Macondo was still young, are deciphered only when every prediction has been fulfilled, including the final, devastating wind that takes apart Macondo. The future is thus history, the end is the beginning, and the reader is tempted to start again.

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