I didn't love the book, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I just want to share some of my irrelevant thoughts. I also have some questions. Please don't get offended. I'm a dumbass so all symbolism etc probably flew over my head.
What was Amaranta's deal? She loved Pietro Crespi sooo much that she sabotaged his marriage with Rebeca, but when he comes to love her, she rejects him and he kills himself? She goes on to kind of egg on Gerineldo Marquez, but she rejects him too. A while after, she engages in an inappropriate relationship with her nephew who's like a toddler or something? What's up with her?
What's up with Colonel Aureliano Buendía? He wants to marry a nine-year-old child who still wets her bed, but later Ursula says she's sure he never loved anyone at all? Why was it that he fell in love with a literal child then? What's that supposed to represent??? Perhaps, I'm looking at this from a modern perspective, but so much weird, disturbing shit went down in this book. I'm just unsure what to think.
Why is there SOO much fucking in this book? All men are horny 100% of the time. I'm pretty sure if someone asks me a year later what I remember from the book, my answer will most likely be… incest, incest, rape, more incest. The Buendía men are always trying to fuck their sisters, cousins, aunts, mothers??? So many scenes of men raping young girls, forcing their literal aunts and mothers into having sex with them.
What's up with that? Is this supposed to represent some kind of curse in the family? Like, I just don't understand the purpose of adding so many sex scenes and scenes of grown man getting a child pregnant??? What is the point, is my question? Is there a hidden meaning I did not understand? What was up with Rebeca eating dirt? It seemed like she would get better, eat dirt, get better again, eat dirt and on and on? Is she mad?
Also, at some point, it was mentioned that Remedios the Beauty would smear her own shit and piss on the walls? Then, in another scene, she floats in the air and ascends to heaven? So, like, did she die??? What happened? Is this all supposed to make sense? Or am I just too dumb to understand it?
by Lenore8264
4 Comments
I absolutely love the title hahaha I think that’s exactly what magical realism does to you. Read this one a while ago so can’t help, but loved the book though
It’s an ode of love for termites who eat everyone in the end.
Keep in mind: this is a tale of a family in a backwater, poor rural city.
Incest, rape, child pregnancies? While not common, you will see them much more frequently in really undeveloped regions.
Rebecca eating dirt: that was most likely a condition called Pica, which sometimes arises from anemic iron deficiency. It also is a mental health condition–and it does seem like mental health issues ran in the family, you know?
The book is trying to SHOW you the effects of all of these underlying issues and more without hamhandedly TELLING you.
I don’t read very much, but this was my favorite reading experience of all-time.
Amaranta sabotaged the marriage because of her deep, crazed hatred of Rebeca. Her bitterness poisons everything. Her behavior shows the cyclical nature of isolation and self-destruction within the family.
As for the sex, and other things you mention, it’s a book about how colonialism, resentment, and isolation are destructive. So there are a lot of destructive behaviors in the book. If he had left those out, nobody would know what the book was supposed to be about. It’s like asking, “why did a book about war have so much fighting and anguish in it?” It’s because it’s literally what it’s about, the anguish of war. This is the same—the things in the book are what the book is about, the negative consequences of what the book is about. So the books has to have the negative consequences to be about what it’s supposed to be about. If that makes sense. It’s a book that wants you to draw the conclusions, it doesn’t want to preach them to you.