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This was a good reminder for me to read with an open mind. I kept wanting this book to be something it wasn't... I wanted interiority, psychology, immersiveness. I wanted to REALLY know the characters instead of reading about what they're doing. But this book does none of that and it was frustrating. It read almost like a 500 page movie synopsis, beautifully written synopsis, but synopsis nonetheless... and I wanted to watch the movie itself! But then I realized that it's just not what this book is trying to do, and that I needed to meet it on its own terms.

Near the end of the novel, there is a lot of decay. The vegetation has come into the cracks and the ants have carried away the waste. And that's an appropriate image, because reading this novel is much like watching those ants from above. Marquez's angle is so macro that it's hard to be truly involved with the characters. Instead, the only character is the town itself. I got to know the town almost as if peering into an ant colony, and seeing how cycles repeat themselves on the micro and macro levels.

Through this god-like point of view, we're able to see these cycles on a mythical level, the stories told and retold, the names repeated over and over. And again I was reminded of Joseph and His Brothers, a book that I feel revolved around a similar idea from a completely different angle (and was very immersive, but I mean, it did use another 1000 pages to do it haha, so there's that).

Much has been made about the magical realism in the book. I found it pretty tame compared to some other books. I guess I read more out there shit, and I guess a lot of people live off a diet of boring realism. I don't think it should be made into such a big thing. Basically, it's expressionism. Things happen, you accept it and try to grasp its emotional resonance instead of reading it overly literally or overly symbolically.

I did like that the book made subtle digs at the idea of what is magic, though... and that it is relative to who's looking. To the colonialists, a person being blown away with the laundry is magical. But to the locals, it's normal. Ice, on the other hand, is much more magical!

For those who loved this book, or loved the idea of it, but want a little more immersiveness (like I did), I recommend Elena Garro's Recollection of Things to Come. It was written a few years before A Hundred Years of Solitude, and I've always thought it criminally underread and underappreciated. Like this one, it is also uses "magical realism" to tell an intergenerational story. It's about a town with lots of characters, intrigue, politics, etc. It's got a POV just distanced enough to paint a tapestry, and yet you still feel a connection to all the characters, and the whole thing is very moving.