By reflecting on this novel, one question arises: what year was this novel set in? I ask this because I find it hard to imagine such a time, when people seem content but poor, gypies roamed the earth and people got amazed by every wonder that approached them. Some descriptions of the town make it seem like the houses were mad out of mud and the people roamed naked. Also, I found it very disturbing that the sons, Aureliano, and Jose Arcadio wanted to have intimate relations with women that were childern, when they were in their teens. When the parents are okay with Aurelian marrying Remedios, merely just a child, makes me wonder was era this book was written in becasue they are in a society where girls need to get married, although they have no problem with call women like Pilar. I know it was her misfortune that she got raped but she sexual relations still persisted so she seems like a call girl to me. The initial first pages reminded me of Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salmon Rushdie, because of all the magic and mysteries the Earth can bring. There are so many dynamic relations in this novel, I am looking foward to continue reading, but I don’t know if I will be able to keep track of all the intertwining relations.
Cien Anos de Soledad
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March 9, 2007 at 9:50 am |
Ronika, I think you raise a really interesting question. I think that the time setting of the novel is intentionally sort of ambiguous and intangible, and not necessarily realistic. For example, the first page tries to make it sound like the setting is an ancient land, before human development. The descriptive mention of “huevos prehistoricos” suggests that time period, as does the claim that at that time, “el mundo era tan reciente que muchas cosas carecían de nombre.” This statement is not true though, since that time was after European colonization of the Americas, long after the world was “recent enough” that many things did not yet have names. I wondered though, if that sentence referred to Aureliano Buendía’s memory of the world at that time, since it is through his memory that this initial chapter is related. Perhaps the world was new enough to him at that time that he did not yet know the names of things? Memory seems to play an important role in the story.
Anyways, I guess we can assume that the novel is set in the 18th or 19th century. This is from the opening of the second chapter which claims that Ursuala’s great-grandmother was alive during Francis Drake’s siege of Riohacha. (I just had to wikipedia that one, and, as it turns out it is a real event that happened in 1596.) So if Ursula is alive three generations after 1596, I figure that places the opening chapters of the story around the 19th century? But as I said, I think time is a tricky thing to pin down in this book.