61. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Márquez (100 book challenge)

[Trigger warning: This post discusses rape and child sexual abuse]

I didn’t enjoy the feeling this book left behind. It was meant to be a classic, a reflection of real life and culture in Colombia over a 100 year span. It was meant to be witty and even laugh-out-loud funny. But something about it was off.

This book had a number of scenes with rape and child sex abuse scattered throughout, which were totally relevant as a true reflection of real life. But the thing that left me feeling uneasy was the way in which these scenes were written. They seemed to poke fun at the victims, blame them for their ‘mistakes’, and make the perpetrators almost seem like the victims themselves. Women who resisted the sexual advances from men were generally ‘proven wrong’ when they seemed to enjoy the intercourse. One character was painted as a morally advanced man when he waited until his to-be victim reached puberty before he raped her.

I’m all for using fiction to point out the problem with people in society. But the biggest issue with 100 Years of Solitude is that it did not once recognise the horror that these women went through in their lives. The narrator was quick to glorify the men on the other hand, for example, explaining in minute detail over a single-sentence page how much a male character lusted for his next victim.

When I read Marquez’s earlier book in the 100 Book Challenge, Love in the Time of Cholera, I did feel the love story leaned towards being creepy and stalker-ish. I dismissed it, telling myself ‘it was an accurate reflection of the times’ and ‘maybe I missed the point’. But now I have read two of his books, I really think he was simply a creep trying to justify the times he had personally treated women poorly. Or worse, just a creep who honestly believed that rape and child sex abuse is not actually treating women poorly at all.

I also questioned while reading both Marquez’s books whether they treat these themes so badly because they were written so long ago, and society didn’t know any better back then. But I was wrong. Marquez wrote 100 Years of Solitude when he was aged 40… in 1967. This is not an old book! It was published less than 2 decades before I was born.

In my fury over writing this blog post today, I Googled whether others have felt the same, and I came across a superb article from 2018 that so perfectly articulated my thoughts, so here it is. Please, have a read.