The circle of life

The first page of this book contains a family tree and upon seeing it my heart sank. I am not one for books that are so complex that they require external charts and diagrams to keep track of everything. But when I started reading I forgave the book completely.

The main protagonist is not a person as much as it is a family and the town they establish; the town is completely isolated and in a sense so is the family. All the characters in the story are flat, two-dimensional characters; their feelings and actions seems to run through them rather than being initiated by them. It truly is their family that these events happen to rather than them as individuals, further supported by the way time circles in the book; personalities are defined by the names given to the (male) characters and the Aurelianos and José Arcadio’s enter again and again in new forms, to have new actions and emotions. It is confusing at times to seperate the man from the action, which one is sleeping with his aunt again? But it makes no difference, no matter which person we follow they are alone. Each and every character is a symbol of the time period they were born in. They are not a separate person.

This circularity of events at once muddles and clears the storytelling; it is what creates the magic realism of the book and it is what makes it intangible. The story is told as one long preface to the actual story, setting up scene after scene, but rarely pausing to let events occur there; it lingers on strange details one minute and in the next it analyses and explains the grandiosity of love and life and death.

“…time was not passing…it was turning in a circle…”