43. One Hundred Years of Solitude: The optimal amount of incest is non-zero

Everyone loves Gabriel García Márquez’ 1967 genre-defining classic One Hundred Years of Solitude.

At first we were charmed. But after trying to track a complex web of births and deaths and affairs and inc*stuous unions all taking place in the first 100 pages we found ourselves mired deep in the swamp.

When we reached the halfway mark we recorded an episode so hopelessly confused that we had to junk it. As we trudged through the second half, we fantasised about the devastating critiques we would unleash. then right on the very cusp of recording this pod, we all sheepishly admitted we were kinda back on board again??

Come on a journey with us to Macondo: often maddening but always magical.

The elephant in the room is magical realism: have we found our kryptonite? Rich accepts that we’re meant to soak up the vibe rather than spergily analyse it, but still has problems with the genre. How can characters have meaningful stakes in an arbitrary world? is it even possible to write a non-fatalistic work? Can fiction be in some sense ‘truer than true’? Cam advances the bold thesis that magic is cool, actually.

On the cyclicality of human decline: do the characters matter as individuals, or are they fractals of Macondo itsef? Is this a biblical post-eden loss of innocence story? A nod to Spengler’s theory of cyclical civilizational collapse? Is historical determinism total bullshit? We’re not sure but we don’t love the fatalism here.

On the solipsism of the Buendia family: seriously, what’s with all the inc*st?? why is there so little true love or tenderness? why couldn’t they have called their kids Pedro or Juan or something? This book is supposedly critical of colonialism and material progress but Cam and Rich can’t help coming away with a straussian reading in which GGM is mostly mocking his stupid inbred countrymen.

On the belovedness of this book, and why it missed the mark for us: Is there something here that only Latin American people can understand? Do you need to be familiar with the history of Colombia? Is the book better in the original Spanish? Is it a dose-dependent thing?

Plus: new book announcement. it’s a big one.

First impressions

Rich: And so I’m back with the impressionistic reading, which is fine. It’s just, is it fine for 400 pages?

Cam: Yeah, I mean I have the exact same notes — my notes even say “I agree with Rich” — to prove that we’re the most agreeable book club.

Rich: Evergreen.

Benny: This is like Melquíades’ parchment predicting what you’re going to say in reaction. This is all determined.

Rich: Welcome to Do You Even Lit. This week we are reading Gabriel García Márquez’s landmark novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is a fantastic chronology of six generations of the Buendía family living in small-town Colombia and dealing with all the problems that arise as it becomes entangled with the outside world. If you haven’t heard of this book, it’s kind of a big deal. It literally won the Nobel Prize for Márquez, and critics and the general population alike are huge fans of it. It’s been described as the first piece of literature since the book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.

Benny: Who said that? The author?

Rich: Yeah, I didn’t get the name of the critic — that was just the most fawning of many in that genre. It was quite hard to find anyone who had anything not nice to say about it. So, continuing in that vein, I’m going to throw to you first, Cam. How much did you love this book? Do you wish we could give it two Nobel Prizes?

Cam: Yeah, I think we’re going to annoy a few people potentially. Benny’s Colombian friend might stop playing board games with him. Rich’s wife and my mother might be disappointed.

Rich: Two different people, to be clear.

Cam: Unlike the book, yeah. And in that vein, the 17 girls that Benny’s dating — I’m not sure if any are baby mamas — so I think they might all be let down because it seems like the three of us, surprisingly or not, didn’t seem to like this book all that much. Maybe we just have similar tastes, but what’s surprising, as Rich said, is you cannot — you literally can’t find a negative review on the internet. Maybe one or two in Melquíades’ Sanskrit tome, but it’s very hard to find a negative review. I found one by the other Latin author, Bolaño — he said magical realism stinks, but that was his review of it. Apart from that, it’s as close to universally loved as you get. As Rich said, both critics and fans love it, and I’m getting hints that all of us maybe are the exceptions there.

So I just wanted to put some of my issues up front quickly, but I’m pretty open to being wrong about this. I didn’t like the pacing — I thought it was too fast-paced. The characters, which we’ll get into, are a confusion to keep track of. And of course the damn magical realism. It just seemed like this fast-paced thing where a lot of random stuff just keeps happening, and it requires a lot of effort, as is famous, because the author calls all of those characters the same name — so we have the José Arcadios and the Aurelianos, and then you also have the Amarantas and the Rebecas and the Remedioses, and a lot of these names repeat. So it’s very hard to get your bearings and keep track. It requires a lot of effort, and we’ve read a few effortful books, so I’m not against that in principle, but a lot of the time it felt like the effort wasn’t worth it. It was hard to see why you were doing this, because it just seemed like a lot of random stuff happening 12 times a page for sometimes not a lot of point.

As I said, open to being wrong. I also think it could be a grower — unlike José Arcadio the Second. More so than other books, I could see myself looking back at this, whether as a kind of concept handle for its themes, or just as this kind of magical story, and looking back fondly.

Rich: Should we give the listener a glimpse behind the curtain here as well and just say that we tried to record an episode about this when we were halfway through the book, and we were just so confused and groping around aimlessly that we just had to shitcan it basically and start again.

Cam: So like the book, we’re going to make the same mistakes this week.

Rich: It’s very likely.

Benny: We’re doomed to failure.

Rich: And then just off-mic, before we started, we were saying, “Oh, I think I might kind of like this book again.” So yeah, it’s going to be an extremely incoherent episode. And Benny, you’re broadly aligned with Cam — you’re going to talk more about your own beefs with the book a bit later on.

Benny: Yeah, and I’m actually even more aligned with Cam in the sense that in the last day — we all sort of complained about it in group chat yesterday, and we even structured our outline so that our criticisms wouldn’t all appear at the same time. But even since then, I think the thesis about the book has cohered enough in my mind where I can understand what the book was driving at. I think I understand the main narrative arc and the themes he was trying to drive at. And with that in mind, I can actually say that I can understand the choices that the book made and I can actually appreciate the writing style in light of what I take the major thrust of the novel to be and the messages it gets across.

I don’t agree with the message. I don’t like the message. And I think that’s where my issue with the book comes. But you also can’t read fiction expecting to actually like the underlying message, or at least I don’t think that’s the right way to read fiction. So I’m kind of at this place where I can appreciate the stylistic choices he made, but I just kind of disagree with the substantive message, if you will — or at least insofar as you think and agree with me that there is a substantive message there.

Maybe the first thing to talk about is just the style of the book. This is, I think, like the main text that people refer to when they think about the genre of magical realism. I didn’t know much about the history of magical realism, and I know, Rich, you’ve thought a bit more about that. You want to give us the lowdown on the history there?

Cam: I just knew it stinks. That’s all I had heard about it.

The case against magical realism

Rich: Yeah, well I’m tempted to do a big rant, but it’s hard to beat “it stinks” for concision. So, what the hell is magical realism? It’s a response to realism. With realism you have writers trying to depict the world more or less authentically as it is — we’ve read quite a few writers in that vein. It’s kind of what you think of as the default mode of literature. And then you have modernism, where you get more into subjectivity and fragmented perspectives and not necessarily having a ground truth — Woolf would be in that category, Joyce would be in that category, maybe Kafka, I guess.

And then magical realism is basically a twist on realism where you have supernatural magical elements, except they are not treated as exceptional. The characters in the story just treat them as mundane — they’re a mundane part of life. So in this book, for instance, we’ve got ghosts that pop up when certain people die but not necessarily when everyone dies. We’ve got it raining for four years non-stop. We’ve got a plague of insomnia. What else? We’ve got a woman who gets spirited up into the sky along with the laundry on a gust of wind.

Cam: A long streak of blood that takes turns and goes through the village.

Cam: We have yellow butterflies following a man everywhere he goes, over 100 years — more than 100 years of solitude. We have a flying carpet.

Benny: People living for very long times. Tied to trees.

Cam: All sorts. We have babies turning up in baskets.

Benny: Don’t babies always turn up in baskets? That’s how it works.

Rich: So I’ll compare magical realism to fantasy to give an example of how it differs. When you’re writing fantasy, what you do is you tweak one element of the world that you live within, change the rules in some way, and then you see how the characters and the people within that book respond to the slightly changed rules of reality. So you get sort of a sandbox where you say, “what if dragons existed? How would that play out? What would that mean for the power structure of warring kingdoms?” Or you can do it with science — what if a certain technology existed? What if we had interstellar travel? What if we had widespread cloning technology? And then you play within the sandbox and see what the implications are. Or you can do it even with sociology or anthropology, like we saw with Ursula Le Guin, where she says, what if you had a serious society that was seriously trying to do anarchic syndicalism? Let’s explore. Let’s see how that looks.

And then with magical realism, you very deliberately don’t get that. You don’t have internal consistency in your world and you don’t have clearly defined rules.

Benny: So it’s like Philip K. Dick, basically.

Rich: Well, at least Philip K. Dick was doing the meta, but in magical realism you’re not meant to delve too deeply into why a certain thing happened, or in what circumstances someone comes back from the dead, or why this object flies but not that object. There’s no rules, and you as the reader are not meant to be fixated on that. And certainly the characters are not fixated on that, because for them, magic carpets are in the same category of things as magnets or a steam train. There’s no distinction between them.

Cam: Yeah, but is it common that they’re kind of inconsistent with each other, or incoherent? Because I would have thought it could also be just that this element of magic is just part of the world, as our magnets are. And then perhaps they should cohere — but then it’s harder to get a distinction from fantasy. You know, I wondered if part of the distinction was just a literary quality — something reads like literature and would-be realism, or something close to, without the magic.

Rich: Yeah, I think that is part of it, because it’s so associated with Latin American writers in particular, and there’s a certain aesthetic associated with that. Like, Kafka could arguably be considered proto-magical realism, because I remember my naive take — I was mad when Gregor wakes up as a bug and no one reacts. It’s just like, no one comments on the fact that he’s a bug. So that’s the same kind of thing — within that world, that’s not the exceptional thing, but it’s like a metaphor for isolation and alienation from one’s peers. But here that’s not the case. It doesn’t need to be that the butterflies are a metaphor for this, or Remedios flying away into the sky is a deep metaphor for that. There doesn’t actually have to be a parallel. It’s kind of like deconstructing the Western literature notion that this has to be in here because it causally links to this other thing or means something. It’s just like, no, we live in a magical world and magic just sort of manifests in all of these interesting ways.

So I really bent over backwards last time to make the case that this is fine, because I’ve been a hater of this genre before and I wanted to really try hard and try to meet it where it’s at.

Benny: Rich is like the dog in the burning house, just like, “this is fine” as random incoherent elements get introduced into the book.

Rich: I really didn’t mind it for a good length of time into the book, and I think that’s why last week, or last discussion, I was ready to defend it. Because it’s a vibe. It’s just a vibe. The argument I made last time is that this is not about spergy analysis of disentangling which José Arcadio Buendía is married to whose niece’s nephew, and constantly referring back to the key or whatever, or exactly why the butterflies are doing whatever. It’s just meant to wash over you. It’s meant to be impressionistic. It’s meant to evoke a certain type of mood or make you feel a certain type of way. And you’re meant to just get swept up in it and feel this book more so than try to explicitly think it.

Cam: To be honest, when you look at a lot of the praise online, one of the most common words you’ll find is “beautiful.” This book is beautiful. That’s often the defense of it, or the praise of it. So along the lines of this kind of impressionistic vibe that is elegantly written and has this kind of magical beauty to it.

Rich: Yeah. It is beautiful. I was going to walk back this thesis, but now I’m kind of back there again. All I’m left with is this impressionistic reading, which is actually fine and that I enjoyed and would enjoy in small doses. Like if this was a collection of short stories or something, I think it could have been great. And I got exhausted of it in a 400-page novel. But I certainly enjoyed the start of the book — when I started reading it, I was like, “oh damn, this is going to be good.” I was really excited and I thought this would be a great book. And then as I finished reading it last night, I was like, “man, this is actually a beautiful book.” And then there was just a 200-page slog in the middle where I was getting a little bored and it felt a little repetitive, and I did have to skim large parts of it.

Cam: Even though it’s universally praised, when I mentioned my struggles with reading it to people, they did sympathize with — maybe that distinction of Kahneman’s, experiencing self versus remembering self. People that had a fond view of the book, yeah, they did sympathize with it being a slog, and certainly getting your bearings and finding out who’s who, and just all this random stuff happening, and you feel like you’re slogging through it and you’re not sure why sometimes.

Benny: Yeah, I mean, I think this book is basically the stem-cell kryptonite. Insofar as this is correct, that you’re supposed to just let it wash over you and it’s supposed to be impressionistic — this is exactly how we’re trained to not read a book. We want to map out each character, understand who’s related to who, try to work out the rules of the road, figure out when magic is going to appear, when it’s not going to appear. And you almost have to train yourself or explicitly talk yourself out of trying to read this book like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why we all struggled a lot. And it’s certainly at least why I struggled.

Cam: I’m not totally sure of that thesis though. I agree, you know, there is this approach where it doesn’t matter who’s who, and that’s one of the themes. But I imagine a lot of fans really enjoy nerding out and drawing the tree. That’s quite — I mean, every copy now comes with a tree, and there’s a million ones online to download. Just drawing the tree, finding out who’s who, noticing the differences between the José Arcadios and the Aurelianos, and just noticing all these different love triangles, and the inward-facing love triangles back to the tree.

Rich: They need new geometry for the types of love arrangements that are happening in this book.

Cam: Yeah, yeah, not quite a triangle. Macondian fractals.

Rich: They need like non-Euclidean geometry.

Benny: The love manifolds. Oh my God.

Cam: I think a lot of people — it is kind of worth knowing who’s who and the differences between these people, but at the same time, I think it doesn’t matter to take that approach as well. Anyway, let’s hear the case — I want to hear, whether it’s your view or not now, Rich, I want to hear the case against magical realism.

Rich: Okay, yeah, I thought I’d kind of given it. But to get a bit deeper on the exact thing — I had a bit more insight on the exact thing that bothers me. I was thinking it was something around not having a well-formed problem space, to put it in super nerdy Popperian terms. Similar to my beef with Beckett, where it’s like, when you don’t have internal consistency, then it’s not obvious what problems are trying to be solved, what the possible set of solutions are, and you don’t get the little payoff of figuring out, “oh, this happened because of that.” When José Arcadio II dies in his room with a mysterious wound and this trail of blood snaking out, it’s not set up as a whodunit that we’re going to resolve or get any clues as to later. It just happens. There’s no rhyme or reason. You move on. And it’s hard to separate that from just randomness.

But the actual deeper problem I have, I realized, is that — you talked, Cam, about how the characterization in this book is not great, because it spans so many different characters, it moves so quickly between their marriages and affairs and divorces and deaths and so on, that it’s already hard to relate to them. They’re unlikable people for the most part. There’s virtually no dialogue. We don’t really know what their motives are. And then on top of that, with this magical realism stuff, it’s like, what’s at stake for these people? What is at stake in a world where some people just return from the dead arbitrarily? How do you feel scared on their behalf or yearning on their behalf? How do you feel invested in their struggles when the world is just so completely arbitrary, and they don’t even particularly care about it?

Like, if you think about José Arcadio Buendía, who is the main character, the original patriarch of the fictional town of Macondo — the first guy we get introduced to — he is a man with a deep burning curiosity about the world. He’s obsessed with alchemy, he’s trying to turn lead into gold, he wants to open up Macondo to the world, he has all these obsessions, and then that’s reflected in quite a few of his descendants as well. But how do you reconcile the fact that they are supposedly deeply curious, but they just have no interest whatsoever in the fact that there’s a flying carpet, or the fact that someone is pursued by giant clouds of butterflies? It just undermines the characterization even more, because these aren’t real people. They don’t have real motivations and wants and desires, because the rules of the world are just totally meaningless and can’t constrain them in a way that’s interesting from a character point of view.

That’s my deeper critique of magical realism and the thing that I just can’t — I know that it doesn’t mean that the genre stinks, as, who was it, Neruda or Bolaño said. It’s just that it has these limitations, put it that way. And so I’m back with the impressionistic reading, which is fine. It’s just, is it fine for 400 pages? You know, in my experience, no. And maybe in your guys’ experience too.

Cam: Yeah, as you said, even without the magic, you’re not invested in these characters. Random stuff’s happening, and the magic kind of accentuates it and elevates it.

Benny: I mean, I think the point that it makes it harder to identify and understand their struggles as characters, and to empathize with them, is a very deep point. Because you’re not sure how they view the world. You don’t have any sort of mental model of being able to sympathize with them, because you don’t know what’s going to surprise them, what’s going to be off-putting, what sort of solutions they might bring to bear on the problems that they’re facing in their lives — because they could just pull literally a rabbit out of a hat and solve it in some bizarre way that you hadn’t foreseen, and that wouldn’t break the rules of magical realism.

Whereas that’s not the case when we’re reading Crime and Punishment, and you can really sympathize with the character because you understand the rules. This guy has killed this old woman — to some extent you can put yourself there and then understand what sort of tools are available to him to solve his problems. You can understand the struggles he’s undergoing. But this really cuts off your ability as the reader to engage in any sort of cognitive empathy with the characters. And that just makes for a very hard, disorienting reading experience.

Rich: Yeah, I think that’s a nice point.

Cam: And even to echo Rich’s example — when José Arcadio II dies and it’s just like no one really cares, everyone moves on, even though it’s this big mystery. And even in the opening scene, which is famous now, where Colonel Aureliano is facing the firing squad and thinks back to the time when his father showed him ice — it kind of sets up this interesting thing that we want to find out, and that resolves itself quite early, and there’s not a lot of meaning to it either. He escapes the firing squad kind of randomly, like sort of everything else, and then they just move on and forget about it, and it’s not a big deal. That seems to happen a lot, and you just grow to realize that there’s nothing you’re kind of moving forward towards or that you care about all that much.

I mean, when you do finish the book, you do kind of see this overarching — okay, you know, it’s this six- or seven-generation town that is the main character that was born and died, perhaps.

Rich: It makes it even stranger that — I mean, it does have some thematic significance, to be fair. The line is “many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” There’s interesting points there, but not actually around him meeting the firing squad, which also comes up repeatedly. Then he meets the firing squad and they don’t kill him — I can’t even quite remember why.

Cam: His brother saves him, actually. The captain that was leading it just sort of lets it happen.

Rich: Yeah, or rather, it’s not that it’s not plot-relevant, it’s just that it’s one of a thousand random little things that happen throughout the book. There’s no great significance attached to any given death, saving, affair, war, battle, fight, suicide. You’re just absolutely deluged with this chain of events across a hundred years of family history.

There’s something else you said that I wanted to pick up on, but I’ve just lost the thread. Oh yeah — just also the example of José Arcadio II dying. It’s a great juxtaposition.

Cam: Arcadio.

Rich: Hey, José Arcadio.

Cam: Arcadio.

Rich: Oh my God.

Cam: 50-50.

Rich: I had a 50-50 chance and I still fucked it up. That’s a great juxtaposition, because that’s one of the really cool magical scenes in the book, of which there are many, which you can imagine would be so dope. It’s probably in the Netflix adaptation, I imagine — of this line of blood snaking its way through the town, and it ends up in Úrsula’s house. So it’s like the blood of her son making its way to her. Beautiful, evocative scene. No apparent meaning attached to that event. Or if there is, you have to dig pretty hard for it. Certainly no one in the book cares about it. And that’s just how it always is. There’s so many funny, interesting, fascinating, beautiful events in this book, like I often really enjoyed, but it’s just there’s so little connective tissue, at least at the level of individual characters and causality of this event leading to that.

Cam: Yeah, they often don’t care and move on. Like, José Arcadio the first ends up being tied to the tree quite early on for the rest of his time in the novel, and people just ignore him from there. Amaranta dies and people move on. I suppose the blood is kind of perhaps a metaphor for the news finding herself to the mother, who’s the matriarch and knows everything about the town. But in terms of him passing, people give a pretty cursory thought about it and then move on, like everything else.

Benny: So what do you guys think the point of writing it in the magical realism style was? Do you think a similar book could have been written in like a realist style and then gotten the same message across, touched on the same themes, etc., or do you think it was integral to what the book was about?

Cam: I think it’s related to one of the things that we’re going to talk around — progress and technology. But other than that, I think it’s just more this impressionistic thing that — I mean, biographically, the author said his grandma used to just tell him stories and just throw magic in there. He liked it. He liked the vibe. And I think people generally like the vibe of magic, like going back in time, for whatever reason. I haven’t kind of clocked why.

Fiction is ‘truer’ than real life (Baudrillard redux)

Rich: It has this truer-than-true element to it, I think, is what having this tool in your toolbox allows for. I was going to talk about this later, but since you brought it up, there’s an interesting example where, towards the end of the novel, the banana company brings in the army to massacre all the striking workers. And one of the characters, one of the José Arcadios, is caught up in the massacre, survives, and is haunted by that scene — 3,000 dead bodies piled into railway cars to be dumped in the sea. That is closely modeled on what actually happened with the rapacious Western banana companies that came to Latin America, but the 3,000 number García Márquez made up, basically. And he made up the specifics of the scene. And then it circled back and entered into actual historic accounts.

He said, “what’s really surprising is that now they speak very naturally in the Congress and the newspapers about the 3,000 dead. I suspect that half of all our history is made in this fashion.” So you can speak in these mythological terms that in some sense feel truer than true, and maybe in this Baudrillardian sense, can possibly even circle back and change the base reality. So yeah, what is it — a signal is now just pointing to another signal, we’ve lost the ground truth. It’s a very powerful tool.

Benny: Yeah. And I wonder if it allows readers to map some of the lessons onto their own life, or to identify with it a little more if you add some of the magic — because then you can sort of twist the world in whatever way is more convenient for you, or allow yourself to be reflected in the characters without totally identifying with them or something. I don’t know.

Cam: I think it’s mainly just people like magic, because it’s magical, like in the other sense of the word. In all of our lives and religions and just stories and fables, you have — I can imagine the grandma telling the story to her grandchildren on the knee, and it just adds flavor and spice to it. And there is something about it that — you have this fictional rural town, which obviously has this parallel of his hometown, and it captures that, but it has this added magical realm to it which makes it quite memorable. And, you know, some of the instances, as we’ve talked about — the blood and the butterflies, and Remedios the Beauty flying off into heaven — they’re quite memorable set pieces as well, whether or not they have a meaningful metaphor behind them.

Rich: Yeah, I think that’s right. Everyone universally loves this stuff. It’s probably just the simplest answer — since you’re a kid you love this stuff.

Cam: Except for rationalist nerds.

Benny: Yeah, struggling to explain it. We’re all like, why do they like it?

Rich: But yeah, like, I really like Greek mythology, for instance. And imagine if I was like, well, one source says that Athena was born of blah blah blah, and another says that she sprung forth from Zeus’s head, and what is this method of giving birth via someone’s head and via a man? It doesn’t make any sense. And it’s like, this is spectacularly missing the point. They’re cool stories and they’re interesting for other reasons that don’t have to do with them hanging together with some internal coherency that spergs like us would obsess over.

Cam: The flying carpet one — I was just like, oh, that would be so useful. I trekked over rural Colombia, like, in swamps. Oh yeah, that would have been useful.

Rich: He’s like, no, the great invention of the new century: ice. Frozen water.

Cam: Fucking ice. Which was described as hot. Was that just meant to be this kind of — I don’t know.

Benny: No, I think that’s the point. Like, if you didn’t know anything about ice, and if you touched it, you’d wonder if you were burned. That would be sort of the language you’d use to describe it, I think. “It shocked me” or “it burned me.”

Cam: It actually is kind of hot. It burns you.

Rich: I guess if you live in the tropics, ice must have been one of — it actually must legitimately have been one of the greatest inventions ever.

Cam: Yeah, well in Colombia and rural Colombia especially, it took a while to arrive.

Rich: Let’s talk about Macondo, because we haven’t even gone there. The setting of the story is important. Benny, I’ll hand over to you. But basically, it’s a small town in rural Colombia on the Caribbean coast, initially cut off from the outside world, and then that changes through the course of the book. So what do you think about the place and its interactions with the outside world?

Benny: Yeah, so I think it was actually based on where he grew up — is that right? You guys read that somewhere — the little town he’s from.

Cam: Yeah, or something like that.

Macondo as a fractal set of human failures

Benny: Let me give you how I’ve started thinking about the book, how I’ve started conceptualizing it, and then we can fit Macondo into that and some of the other themes as well. But this will also allow us to maybe touch on some of the characters in a more linear way. I’ve basically started viewing this fractally. I think he’s exploring the following arc at many different levels, and the arc is something like: you start out in innocence and then you aspire towards something, you try and modernize in some way, you reach towards something, and then you have a fall from grace or some period of corruption, and then finally you have decay and erasure and oblivion. I think this is basically the arc that hits you as a reader at multiple different levels, like nested Russian dolls, throughout the book.

So first you have this at almost every single character’s level. Just to give a few examples: José Arcadio Buendía himself starts out with this early fascination with knowledge and magnets, and he sort of thirsts for new knowledge. He becomes obsessed, ends up abandoning his responsibilities, goes mad, and is tied to a tree for 100 years and then eventually dies. His son the Colonel, originally just innocent, likes doing alchemy with his dad when he’s young, optimistically joins the liberals in the civil war, ends up becoming this absolutely ruthless general that almost orders the execution of his friend, and is only at the last second saved by his mom. He just becomes bitter, ends up shooting himself in the chest. The other son grows up well, ends up leaving Macondo, comes back as some sort of bizarrely tattooed massive decadent man who’s like throwing orgies and stuff in the town, and he gets murdered.

Cam: Pirate.

Benny: Amaranta, same thing — all these characters sort of have these similar arcs. It doesn’t work out well in the end for anyone. And then you abstract yourself one more level — you have, for the family itself over the six generations, sort of starts this way, you have this beautiful original coupling of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula, and then their various children, and themselves aspire to various things throughout life, and the family eventually declines into oblivion. And at the end of the novel is totally forgotten.

And then you also have this at the level of Macondo itself. It gets founded as a sort of utopia, and then tries to start interacting with the world, both via the gypsies and also tries to become one of the centers of economic trade in the world via the banana company. That obviously goes horribly wrong and ends with the banana massacre, and then the town itself disappears into oblivion by this storm at the end.

So anyway, we could keep going through examples, but it’s basically this very pessimistic arc that haunts the characters and just, like, the general storyline at every different level throughout the book. Given that, it’s hard not to read the book as some sort of commentary on the futility of aspiration or modernization. It’s just these never-ending cycles of decline that don’t lead anywhere. None of the characters end up being happier at the end, really, than they were at the beginning. I don’t think you can say that they learned valuable lessons along the way, or something — that even though things didn’t work out in the end, it was like good to have that struggle. It seems like the struggles are mostly just negative for all of them. There don’t seem to really be silver linings. And it just seems to be about fatalism and determinism.

And so I think that’s part of the reason I didn’t like it, because I don’t, like, epistemologically like that message. But putting that aside — so given that, if you agree with me that that’s the message of the book, then I think the writing style conveyed that message quite well. And I think you guys had a similar experience where you try and read the book, just trying to parse what’s going on page to page is very difficult. But, like, putting even the magical realism stuff aside, just tracking the characters — like Cam said, things are happening very quickly, and you’re sliding back and forth between various characters. Everyone’s named very similarly, so it’s like, which generation am I in again? You’re not sure if you’re talking about the second son, the third son, who people, everyone’s cheating on each other with in various different ways. And tracking specific details…

Cam: Sometimes I try to orientate myself and do that, and you’d go back three or four pages and it still wouldn’t help. Usually in a book that might help, and you’re still lost.

Benny: I would go back through four pages and be like, “I don’t even remember this detail.” It’s like, I’m reading this for the first time again. But it also gives this weird element where everything’s sort of self-similar in this way, and it just kind of hits you. And I think the point is, like, it doesn’t matter — the details don’t matter that much for any of these individual characters, because the arc is the same, and it’s not going to work out well for anyone. They’re all aspiring to slightly different things, fine, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. It was fatalistic and futile. And from the beginning, this thing was not going to work out very well.

And so, anyway, given that that’s the message, I think he wrote in a style that really lends itself to that sort of theme. And so I can appreciate that a bit. I’m still a bit stuck on why he chose to do the magical realism thing, which is why I asked you guys the question earlier. But you can kind of see it — like, you couldn’t have things like José Arcadio being tied to a tree for a hundred years if you don’t introduce magical realism. So in some ways, there are some necessary elements to highlight some of these cycles of despair. But yeah, instead of me talking more about Macondo now, maybe I’ll just let you guys react to that and see if you agree or disagree.

Spengler’s theory of cyclical history

Cam: Well, it’s interesting, just you talking that — are you guys familiar with Oswald Spengler’s view on history?

Benny: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: I’m not.

Cam: Oh, okay. Well, it’s very similar to what you just described, Benny. He has a view on cyclical history, and funnily enough, I guess Márquez seems to inadvertently have written a Spenglerian text, with some differences. But Spengler kind of viewed cultures and civilizations as analogous to an organism. And it’s determined that, you know — as organisms, I mean, Deutschian and Aubrey de Grey concerns around aging and death aside — an organism is born and it grows and it kind of reflects its soul, then it kind of decays and finally dies. And there’s nothing you can do about it. His famous work was Decline of the West — that he thought the West was, so he’s writing in the 20s and 30s, that was going to happen. And he argued at the time that things like declining fertility rates and stuff like that aren’t causes of it — these are just symptoms of like we’re in the final stages, and this happens to all great civilizations and cultures, like Egypt and classical Greco-Roman and Indian and Chinese.

But he also viewed these cultures as separate. He was pushing back at the kind of Enlightenment idea of linear progress. He thought, well, all these civilizations are kind of different organisms, and they all have the same arc. So Macondo fits into this very nicely — it just has this exact arc. So when it reflects its soul, I think Spengler talks around religion and art and stuff like that — that’s like the peak of the culture and the civilization. And then when it starts to decay, that’s when technology and materialism and bureaucracy and all that come in before its death. And this is exactly what happens in Macondo.

But I suppose one slight difference is, I think when Spengler talks around history being in cycles, he just says that any new culture or civilization will have this arc. So ancient Rome had this arc, and now our civilization, culture is separate from that, and we’ll have this arc as well. Macondo will have this arc. But in this book, what we also see is we see instances and characters repeat themselves. So I’m not sure if that’s necessarily Spenglerian — but where, you know, the José Arcadio I and the José Arcadio II and the José Arcadio V all make the same mistake of trying to bang their auntie or something, which we’ll deep dive into a bit more later.

Rich: We’ve all been there. It’s nice, though, don’t you think, to have those micro cycles within the meso cycle or macro cycle? It’s kind of like a little fractal thing. It’s a structural thing that we should give credit for. And I didn’t really realize until you laid that out, Benny, about the trajectory of Macondo mirroring the trajectory of each character. I also hadn’t quite realized — you’re right — like Macondo ends as a town where no one remembers the Buendía family’s name. And it peaks really soon, like quite early in the Spenglerian cycle, I guess. It’s funny, because it’s originally quite a primitive town. They have to bush-bash through the swamp to get there. Their huts are made of mud and banana fronds, kind of thing. But they’re very proud of it. They’ve got no formal government — they just have the town patriarch. And they are proud that no one has ever died in Macondo for a long while. But it seems like maybe it reaches its peak — maybe I’m having recency bias of the later part of the book, but I’m remembering a lot of decline and not a lot of peaking and ascendancy. I guess just because bad things start happening fairly early on.

Cam: Yeah. The insomnia plague happens like, I don’t know, chapter three or four, I can’t remember exactly, but very early on. And the heat wave.

Biblical parallels: post-Eden loss of innocence

Rich: There’s a biblical parallel too that I just noticed — which is that I had been thinking of Macondo as the pre-contact Eden equivalent, the land of abundance and peace, no one dies. But then the big four-year deluge at the end is like the flood, right? It’s like Noah’s flood, cleansing the earth of the wicked and leaving behind just a clean slate to start over. I think that was very likely on purpose too.

Cam: Yeah, because that rain — four years of rain that happens, I think, after the banana massacre. Yeah, it’s quite directly biblical. But even if there aren’t direct analogies between them, it certainly felt biblical. You can imagine things like the plague of insomnia, that happens to a town and then ravishes another town — things like that had a kind of biblical feel to it.

Benny: And even José Arcadio and Úrsula feel a bit Adam and Eve-y. Like, they go off, they found this town. I guess instead of Eve eating the apple, it’s more José Arcadio Buendía eating the fruits of knowledge or something. So the man sins in this case, instead of the woman.

Rich: Meeting the gypsy.

Benny: The snake is a gypsy. I swear it’s just a gypsy. But yeah, it’s definitely reminiscent of that. So I think it was hard for me to divorce my dislike of that sort of message from appreciating the book itself — which I think a real critic of fiction would be able to do. Like, you should sort of be able to just judge how well the book investigated a certain message and not actually pass judgment on the message itself as saying something about reality. But that’s just hard for me to do. I just don’t like the pessimism.

Rich: Just back up a sec, Benny — what is it exactly? Is it the fatalism that you don’t like? Fatalism is kind of a bankrupt philosophy.

Benny: Yeah, so it’s the fatalism and it’s sort of this anti-progress message that runs throughout it. You have these people aspiring to do things, to contact the outside world, to learn about things, to engage in trade, to integrate themselves in the wider world — and none of this works well. All the various love affairs don’t work well. So it’s sort of this “aspire to what you will but it’s all going to end in disaster, and moreover this is all predetermined, there’s no way to escape this cycle, the future of humanity is just destined to…”

A Straussian reading contra the anti-progress themes

Cam: The final sentence says, “because races condemned to a hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” I did wonder if there could be this sort of Straussian take, or esoteric take, that it’s maybe pro-progress, or like a critique of anti-progress. I don’t think that is the author’s intention, but you know — as in the title, it’s called solitude. The family and the town are often inward-looking, including their romantic relationships, and that keeps going wrong. They reject — I think at one point, I can’t remember, maybe it’s Úrsula — she suggested, maybe we call him something else, don’t call him José Arcadio, call him Roberto or something, or Pedro. And they don’t. And that goes wrong. And so they’re looking inward to their family to date, and they’re not looking to this outside world for progress, and that goes wrong, and the town goes wrong. The Buendías are condemned to this because of their solitude or their inwardness — well, they just seem condemned to it because they’re condemned to it.

Rich: Dude, this is so funny. I had the exact same thought. And also, I think, like you, I don’t think it’s true, but intended or not, like a Straussian — there’s a Straussian reading of this book where García Márquez is disgusted with his illiterate, solipsistic, incestuous countrymen, and he considers them entirely responsible for their own fate and downfall. And he’s maybe lampooning the idea that the outside world has been their downfall. Because everyone says that this book is anti-colonialist and maybe has tinges of being anti-materialist or anti-progress. But actually, if it’s there, it’s not very heavy-handed.

Cam: You have the banana instance is one obvious example with the Americans. But apart from that, it’s kind of like this history of Colombia against itself, or Macondo against itself — that everyone’s fighting.

Rich: Yeah. So you wonder if this is like his allergy to the stupidity of Latin America making the same mistakes. Like, I know it doesn’t have to be one thing. I feel he is angry with his countrymen here, and it’s not an anti-Western, anti-progress, anti-technology book explicitly. Does that convince you at all, Benny? I mean, I’m not saying that’s what he was trying to do. It’s just kind of like, yeah, maybe the Straussian reading that you take away. The people are so unlikable and so backwards and so insular and so obsessed with themselves, and he’s very clearly putting that forward as a recurring mistake — their insularity and their solipsism.

Cam: Yeah, it’s kind of like Alex Tabarrok’s take on Parasite, the movie, where he’s kind of like, this is in the title — they’re parasites, they’re doing all this despicable behavior, they’re taking advantage of people. There’s kind of this Straussian, reactionary take on it. Which, once you see it, you can kind of see it’s there.

Benny: I’d like to find this convincing, but I don’t. I mean, one of the first cycles is José Arcadio Buendía himself on this quest for knowledge. He becomes obsessed with alchemy, he becomes obsessed with mapping, he becomes obsessed with ice — in order to improve the livelihood of his people in Macondo. And this just ends in disaster. You would think if the underlying message was actually pro-progress, “stop being inward-looking,” etc., then someone like, looking to the outside, in particular to the gypsies who come with new knowledge and new technology and stuff — I don’t know why then you would choose to have that go so poorly. Instead, you might have him be initially interested in that, and then Úrsula or someone from the town demand that he stop engaging with the gypsies because he needs to take care of X, Y, and Z in the town. You just would have made different choices as the author if that’s the actual underlying message. And then the banana farm thing — or the banana company — is then confusing on that front, because they sort of become like one of the epicenters of global capitalism for a little bit, and then that obviously ends in travesty. So yeah, I’m just not fully — I would like this to be true, but I’m just not fully convinced.

Rich: No, you’re right. It’s hard to say it’s a pro-progress argument. It’s more just like, what’s the real root cause of the problems here? It doesn’t actually make a pro-outside-world engagement case, or it’d be hard to argue that it does.

Cam: Well, I suppose, Benny, you also don’t really subscribe to this idea that a civilization or a culture is this kind of organism that dies — like this cycle, the Spenglerian view, you totally reject.

Back to Spengler: is historical determinism bullshit?

Rich: You don’t believe in the determinism.

Benny: I don’t. Spengler as well — he actually thought that not only that there are these cycles of history, but he thought they were predictable. Just as you could roughly say how long an animal is going to live, he thought you could say roughly how long a civilization would last. And I think he made predictions on that front — I mean that’s what Decline of the West, his sort of magnum opus, was about. I think he was making predictions.

Cam: Interestingly, he also said rural areas capture the spirit or the soul for longer than urban cities, which start decaying earlier. So there’s this additional element: you have this rural Colombia having represented, maybe via this sort of magical element, as perhaps a substitute for art and philosophy and spiritual means and religion.

Rich: So do we even — on historicism, do we even need to talk about it? Or we all basically just don’t think that history is sort of totally determined in that manner? I mean, it seems, for me, I’m tempted to say it’s just straight up silly, but I don’t know if there’s a more sophisticated version of it.

Cam: Well, funnily — I don’t want to talk about it too much, but funnily enough, I’ll just flag, I am a little bit sympathetic to that. There’s been some truth there. So it’s almost like Benny hates the message of the book, and part of my turnaround on the book was, like, this is kind of a concept handle of this idea, which is kind of this nice aspect to it. My instincts are leaning against it — the more classical view of linear history but in progress — but I’m more sympathetic to there being some truth to that idea.

Rich: Do you know what historians tend to think about it? Do they think everything is contingent and it’s just all causal, and you just need a really good model of “this led to that”? Or do you think they can pick out higher-level patterns that recur between civilizations, and that will recur with some kind of strong probability regardless of what’s happening at the local specific level?

Benny: Historians are so aware of the complexities and small little decisions that have massive consequences in whatever period they’re studying, that they would be somewhat immune from thinking that there are these broad cycles or things that will necessarily repeat in different epochs in history. That would be my guess. But obviously I’m not sure, and obviously there are some historians, and especially sociologists and now some computer-science-leaning folks like Peter Turchin, who think the opposite — who want to try and identify these broad historical patterns and project them into the future and stuff. But my guess is that among historians it would be the minority view.

Cam: I think, funnily enough, Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic predictions and maybe the Spenglerian predictions independently view a decline happening around about now, I think. If you were basing about it, you go with these independent theories predicting decline.

Benny: Like now? Looking not bad.

Rich: Yeah, and Mercury’s in retrograde, so you know.

Rich: Okay, I was listening — Dwarkesh had a good historian guest on recently, talking about the fall of the Roman Empire, of which I know nothing. And it was interesting to hear him say that actually he thinks most of it came down to being struck by a couple of plagues in close succession — basically arbitrary events. It wasn’t this myth around the populace becoming decadent and the values eroding and so on, all the kinds of lessons that we might like to sort of project onto it. It was like, yes, a plague came along and wiped out 40% of the population, and that’s very destabilizing at a demographic level.

Cam: I hadn’t heard that take as well. But yeah, speaking on whether history repeats — like, part of that meme of “men think about ancient Rome every day,” which, as funny and cool as that is, I think it’s not true. But part of the truth to it is thinking about parallels of the rise of Rome and the empire and the decline, and seeing it now and seeing a potential repeat. There’s a famous phrase, of course, that “history has a strange way of repeating itself.” Yeah, we come from this sort of Deutschian progress background, where we think that there is no reason why, even though every empire in history has lasted, I think, around 300-400 years on average, and less since the Roman Empire — there’s no reason to think that would apply to us now or to Macondo.

Rich: Yeah, I think I remember Taleb saying that it’s like a Lindy kind of a pattern, where you essentially have a flat prior on how long any given group or civilization will last, so you should expect to be roughly halfway through its duration. So if it’s been around for one year, you can expect it will last one more year. If it’s been around for a thousand years, you should expect it to last a thousand more years. And so when a civilization does collapse, it’s like maximally surprising, basically. I don’t actually know if that’s borne out in the data, but that’s just sort of stuck in my head.

Benny: I mean, it can’t be, because if the average person reasoned like that, they would be wrong. Like, most people would be completely wrong. These kinds of arguments always strike me as weird, because using their own language, if you just take the outside view on them — if everyone reasoned that, “oh, where should I expect to be in this trend? I should expect to be roughly halfway through given a flat prior” — most people would just be very wrong. So it seems like you could just use Bayesian language to then just be like, well, I shouldn’t expect this. This is exactly the thing I should not expect.

Rich: You should pick a better reference class.

Benny: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah, it’s a good point. Why not just look at how long empires tend to last instead of using a flat prior? Is that what you’re saying?

Cam: Yeah, I think that is about 300-400 years.

Rich: I was trying to get Benny to say that he likes Bayesianism.

Benny: I like real Bayesianism, just not pseudo-Bayesianism.

Rich: Oh man, there’s the most insane fetishization of Bayes post that I’ve ever seen yet up on Slate Star Codex at the moment. Sorry, it’s a guest post, but it’s wild.

Benny: Oh god. Is it about teaching it in school?

Rich: He’s like, we’ve got to get the kids to understand Bayes — like this one particular statistical tool that’s useful in certain circumstances — we’ve got to integrate it throughout the entire middle school curriculum.

Benny: I know.

Rich: It made me laugh.

Cam: Sometimes you go to some presentation or conference and people use those unintuitive little thought exercises around, like, if there’s a bat and ball that costs $1.10. Or like the class-one for Bayes would be around — you go to the doctor and this many people have breast cancer and this many people don’t, but if someone’s familiar with it, because they’ve just read it before, they’ve been exposed to it, and then they’re in the presentation, and they get people to put their hands up, that smart guy is just like, “yeah, I mean, this is obvious” — you know, it’s like the probability of an accountant and a feminist, like, that’s contained within. It’s like, fuck man, you would have made this mistake, and it’s just because you happen to have read it. But they’re sort of acting like it’s obvious.

Benny: You speaking from personal experience? Cam was burned by someone in a presentation. Fuck you.

Rich: You strike me as the kind of guy who would have your hand in the air.

Benny: Oh yeah, yeah.

Cam: I mean, potentially, hesitatingly putting it up. But no, the point of it is to show that people don’t get it.

Rich: What would you expect the probability is of a person whose hand shoots up very quickly knowing the answer to the question, depending on the base rate of the number of people in the room who don’t put their hands up? It’s Bayes all the way down.

Benny: It’s Bayes all the way down. Oh, God. My activism has done nothing.

Cam: I wonder if it’s worth talking about — the reason why we’re talking about history repeating itself is not just because you have this determined decline in the town, which you don’t find out right at the very end, but it’s also, as we said, some instances repeat themselves. I just wonder if it’s worth just going over what recurring things actually happen. So as we’ve alluded to, we have the names that keep getting repeated, which it seems there’s a nominative determinism aspect to these names — the José Arcadios have a personality and the Aurelianos have a personality. You also have this theme of incest, which is a very strong, prevalent thing. Then you have the wars, I suppose — famously, the 36 wars. Those are probably the main things. I think sometimes the path — I think José Arcadio, the patriarch, took the path to Macondo, and I think his son Colonel Aureliano sees the same sort of Spanish ship. But apart from that, it’s mainly the names and the wars and the incest, really, which we can talk about individually.

‘The optimal amount of incest is non-zero’

Rich: Yeah, we start and finish with incest. So we gotta go to our resident incest expert, Cam. What’ve you got?

Cam: Yeah. I know you mentioned Kafka’s Metamorphosis, of the bug representing alienation. I didn’t want to correct you. It was really about incest.

Benny: I’m waiting for that essay, by the way. Reading incest into Kafka.

Cam: It’s funny — just for this book, such a popular book, you’re kind of surprised how strong a theme it is, really. If not the main theme, apart from history repeating itself — pretty edgy. So, just to look at what happens. So they’re cousins, Úrsula and José Arcadio. And then there’s just other instances. It’s usually an auntie. Everyone’s keen on Amaranta — a great auntie. Oftentimes people don’t fully know they’re — they kind of know. Sometimes you kind of have the get-out-of-jail-free card, like it’s the stepsister.

Rich: Oh no, stepsister, what are you doing? But just to spell out the founding myth, because there’s a nice symmetry — where José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula don’t want to have sex initially, the founders of the town. Úrsula’s mom won’t let her have sex because they’re cousins, they have a common ancestor, and the mythology is that if you have sex with someone you’re related to, then your children will be born with pigs’ tails. So they’re really scared of that for a long time, and then finally they actually do it, and everything turns out okay. But then down the line, with enough incestuous unions along the way, the very last child that’s born in the book does in fact turn up with the pig’s tail. Which is the product of a nephew-aunt relationship, which is the classic pairing that you mentioned, Cam, that crops up quite a few times.

Cam: And then gets taken away by ants, right?

Rich: Yeah, that’s pretty gruesome — that the baby is killed and taken away by ants, basically as soon as it’s born, and the baby’s mother, Aureliano’s aunt, dies during childbirth. And also that’s basically the end of the Buendía line. So it’s a horrible sort of coup de grâce, which is set up right from the very beginning. So that’s one of the big central points clearly, and it’s one of the recurring mistakes. Does anyone have a sense of why that might be so prominent in here, other than that it’s the sort of flesh-and-blood — what would you call it — it’s an example of solipsism in carnal terms.

Cam: Yeah, no, I think that’s probably the main reason, which I didn’t realize till later. But yeah, this kind of inwardness and solitude, that even towards the family — it’s part of, for whatever reason, the Buendías are condemned to it. I think it must also be somewhat of a commentary around small rural villages. I mean, there must be a level of inevitability to this — they just don’t have many people, or like founding populations as well. When you get these small bottleneck founding populations — I mean, even in the biblical myth, right, Adam and Eve — like, you have that thought where there’s just not that many people and your cousins are all there. Now, that doesn’t seem completely true for the Buendías, because the town grows bigger and they still just seem to have this lusting.

Rich: Yeah, they might have had that excuse in the early days, but not by, like, the second generation. There’s plenty of non-Buendías to fornicate with.

Cam: Yeah, which — speaking of, are these people — it’s not a very common motive, I think, to want that. I think as I said off-mic, it’s not like this concern for parents — if they leave their kids time alone they’re going to start messing around. Not to say that happens zero times, but in general, it doesn’t happen.

Benny: What’s the optimal number of times, though? Can’t be zero.

Cam: I’m off to a number of pigtails.

Rich: …is non-zero.

Cam: Yeah. If you could just convince Úrsula of that.

Rich: But actually — hold on, so is the — you will know about this, Cam — what’s the really smart type of Jews called? The Ashkenazi Jews?

Benny: Ashkenazi.

Cam: Yeah.

Rich: Aren’t they super bottlenecked, and it means they got like weird diseases but they’re also really really smart?

Cam: Yeah, they were bottlenecked to like a very small number, I think, in the 1200s to 1300s. I can’t remember exactly — like 300 or something.

Rich: So there was definitely some consanguineous relations going on, right?

Cam: That is a theory why. Even now I think it’s fairly — like, have you ever seen the consanguinity heat maps as well? It’s quite common and non-weird. You guys don’t have one of those on your wall?

Benny: A consanguinity heat map.

Rich: Of course, I’ve seen it. It’s my wallpaper on my computer.

Benny: That’s an episode title right there.

Cam: But from memory, I don’t think it’s too strong in Latin America. I’ve seen theories that Christianity is one of the barriers against that — pushed against that, in sort of the same way Úrsula does, very strong norms against cousin marriage. And there’s an argument there that one of the consequences of that is universalism, because you’re no longer as tribal.

Rich: Which ties to the insularity of the family, right?

Cam: Yeah, yeah. I think the main point is around this inwardness. But it is weird. I mean, a lot of times, almost all the times, it doesn’t get consummated, and a lot of times they don’t know. So it’s just — you know, the hot — well, you assume she’s hot because she gets with everybody — the hot gypsy, Pilar, I think, sleeps with two of them.

Rich: She’s hot in the Netflix adaptation.

Cam: Even when she’s 100, yeah.

Rich: Haven’t got that far yet.

Benny: Úrsula’s hot in the Netflix adaptation. I’ve only seen like half of the first episode.

Cam: Now, I’ve seen a still of her. She looks like a 60-year-old Latin American mama-grandma. Maybe that’s when she’s 100.

Rich: Úrsula — not at first.

Benny: That’s my type, dude.

Rich: She can get it.

Cam: Even if she’s a cousin. I think we touched on it — there’s this kind of inevitability in small towns. I mean, it is odd how strong it is. One of the Aureliano twins — he really wants to get with his auntie. He knows she’s the auntie. I mean, that also has that added age gap — I think she’s getting pretty old at that point, Amaranta, and he just really wants to…

Rich: The zoomers would lose their fucking minds. They’re mad about a 31-year-old guy being with a 26-year-old woman who is not actually related by blood. They’re going to absolutely lose their mind when they read this book. There’s also just — there’s sexual misconduct in here. There’s a lot of it. It’s like, there’s the incest, but there’s also bestiality. There’s lots of whoring, and like under — very young whores. There’s meant to — it’s a horrible phrase, which is like “the girls who lay down so that they might eat” or something, which I think just means really poor young girls who prostitute themselves to get a meal.

And then the other quite bizarre one by modern sensibilities is Colonel Aureliano’s obsessive love with a nine-year-old girl. And he very gentlemanly waits until she gets her period before they consummate the marriage, I think. But even then it’s probably like age 11 or whatever. She dies in childbirth. It’s pretty gross. And it’s like also the Buendía family just exerting their pressure to force this little girl from another family to marry into theirs. It’s a very one-sided thing. And this is one of our leading men — Colonel Aureliano Buendía is like almost our main guy for the first half of the book, I would say, and we follow his wars quite closely, and we think in some sense he’s meant to be a champion of the dispossessed and the underprivileged because he fights these rebel wars, but he’s a pretty rotten character really.

Solipsism and lack of true connection amongst the Buendías

Which actually — I wanted to talk about one other idea I had. A recurring mistake here is that there’s very little true love, genuine love or connection within this family. So, speaking of Colonel Buendía, there’s a quote that I want to read out where Úrsula realizes that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had not lost his love for the family because he’d been hardened by the war, but that he’d never loved anyone — not even his wife Remedios, or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and much less his sons, his 17 sons, who he has no relationship with. She sensed that he’d fought so many wars not out of idealism as everyone had thought, but that he’d won and lost for the same reason: pure and sinful pride. The son for whom she would have given her life was simply a man incapable of love.

And when I came across that passage, it got me thinking that a lot of relationships, almost all the relationships in this book, are just very loveless. There’s lasting, there’s power dynamics, but there’s so little tenderness. It’s really gruesome. So I think — I’m definitely open to thoughts here — but possibly just yet another reflection of the solipsism here, is that people are quite selfish in their desires, and they’re not really, they withdraw into themselves, like physically and metaphorically. Everyone is shut up in their rooms. When Rebeca loses José Arcadio, she shuts herself up until she’s this horrible withered husk of a person. And Amaranta cuts off her nose to spite her face twice — with Pietro, and then with Colonel Gerineldo, who is in love with her. She could have been happy with either of them, but she chooses to die a virgin and just totally retreats into herself.

Cam: Maybe that’s why everyone wants to bang her.

Rich: Is Amaranta an object of affection?

Cam: All the nephews. The Italian chooses Rebeca at the start before that. I mean, yeah, I think that’s right, Rich. I think part of the loveless or the unexplained love is maybe a consequence of this kind of fast-paced, random stuff. Like, part of the random stuff happening is, suddenly this person’s in love with that person without much rhyme or reason, and then suddenly they’re not. And you’re just not that invested with a lot of the relationships. There’s just kind of more stories of some random sexual encounter. I can’t even — this might be my fault — but I can’t even remember why Colonel Aureliano gets with the fortune teller. So José Arcadio first did, and then it just seemed to randomly happen, and then he never really has anything to do with her after that.

Rich: Well, he was a very shy young man, and he had weird hangups about sex. And so he developed a fixation with her, and she helped break, you know — what would you call it — break the seal, break the ice. And then, as I said last time we were talking about this, that clearly led to a really healthy sexual evolution for him, where his next object of affection was a nine-year-old girl who he insisted become his child bride. So yeah, like, getting biblical again. Muhammad-style.

Cam: Speaking of age gap, I think Marx himself or his father, I remember reading, had a young wife. Yeah, it does kind of fit. Go on, Benny.

Benny: It’s a very interesting point that I hadn’t thought of. I think you could argue that at the very beginning, Úrsula and José Arcadio Buendía do share some real love. That’s sort of the only one throughout the book. People have lots of kids obviously, but yeah, you’re right — at least the book just doesn’t focus on the actual affection in these relationships.

Cam: I want to — just on people having lots of kids — I actually think they don’t. Of course you have these hyperboles — Márquez is famous for these hyperboles — with Colonel Aureliano having 17 kids all with the same name, and he goes to 32 wars, José Arcadio travels the world 64 times, etc. But when you actually look at the family tree, most family trees would split off far more than they did. You kind of have the first generation, and then José Arcadio and Aureliano — they have kids of the same woman.

Benny: They just cut off the incest, dude.

Rich: Branches of most trees don’t fuse back together again.

Cam: Yeah, but it’s not just that. It’s kind of like, once you get to third generation, one of the children has like another two or three kids, and no one else does. And then you get to the next generation, and then like one of the kids has [kids]. So it’s kind of odd in that sense. I mean, maybe you’d have too many characters, but I’m sort of surprised he didn’t do that.

Rich: It might be like an artifact of storytelling — that you couldn’t, if it was combinatorial, you couldn’t track the sprawling descendants. It would have to be constrained.

Cam: But perhaps you could kind of get three or four every generation.

Do we like this book? Would we recommend it?

Benny: Alright, so, I mean, interesting — it seemed like we all were complaining about the book a lot this week, but in this convo, we seemed to have somewhat changed our minds. Where are you guys at with this? Do you like it? Would you recommend it? What are your overall takes?

Cam: I’d probably just say watch the show — without having watched it. I don’t know. I still didn’t love the experience, and I’m not sure if I’d recommend it. I’m still puzzled by how popular it is.

Rich: I still want to echo what you said, Benny, on our never-to-be-released episode where we were really groping around. We have done much better this time, I reckon. But last time you said, if there’s any readers out there who love this book, it would be really great if you could write in and tell us why. And you don’t need to criticize our arguments or try and convince us — just if it’s purely an experiential thing, like it made you feel a certain way, whatever it is, like, is valid to you. I’d be pretty interested to hear about that. I’m not as hostile to the book as I was when we were in the messaging and stuff. Would I recommend it? No, I don’t think I would. But there’s something there. I liked parts of it a lot. I liked the first 50 pages. I liked the last 50 pages. And, you know, the less said about the middle part, the better. It’ll be so fascinating to see whether this sticks with us as time goes on.

Benny: Yeah, I mean, I think it is a useful reference point for a book that explores cyclicality and fatalism. I think it’s going to occupy that sort of shelf in my mind, and then I’ll reference back to it in that capacity. And then obviously also with respect to magical realism, if that comes up again. I mean, we should perhaps point out to the audience that this bit of magical realism was, of course, written before any other magical realist work I think we’ve come across in Book Club in particular. In Everything is Illuminated, which was written, of course, after this. Are these the only two books that we’ve read here that have touched upon…

Cam: Piranesi, kind of. Metamorphosis, kind of.

Rich: Maybe. Piranesi, yeah.

Benny: So there’s been a few, all of which are after this. Kafka was after this, right?

Rich: Well, actually, I don’t think Piranesi counts, because the magical in there is awe-inspiring and evokes a lot of curiosity and wonder. So no, I would scratch out Piranesi.

Benny: And there are rules to the game in Piranesi, right?

Rich: Yes, exactly. I also just want to say, the word fatalism just made me think — could you write a magical realist book that wasn’t fatalistic? Is it sort of tied into the very style itself? Because if you’re introducing these elements of arbitrary events happening that characters can’t do anything about or interpret — is it possible to write a non-fatalistic book? And maybe that’s going to be my problem with the genre. If you’re not a fan of fatalism as a descriptive theory of reality or as a philosophy, then it’s pretty hard to escape that if you can’t give your characters any consistent framework to work within and constraints that they can solve problems against. How do you get around that in magical realism?

Benny: I mean, would you describe the magical realist arc in Everything is Illuminated as fatalistic?

Rich: Hmm. It felt a lot less so. It didn’t have the explicit stuff about the inevitability of destruction. Things felt more contingent and less deterministic. And also there’s a dosage thing — you get half or a third of the story, and that resolved some of my problems with this book. In retrospect, I like Everything is Illuminated a lot more than this book, to be honest. And I think partly it could just be from breaking up the story. I think was a great move on his part — into leaving it with actual characters who you can actually emotionally resonate with. That worked better for me, that format. I can’t handle 400 pages of it. That’s my main takeaway. I don’t hate it — I just can’t do this huge tapestry, this very high-level 400-page thing. Doesn’t work for me. I’m open to short stories, I’m open to movies and TV shows, but I’m not open to doing a huge novel.

Benny: Yeah, I think it’s a great point — that this could/should have been either a series of short stories or just one short story. The messages could have gotten across, some of the better plot beats could have been put in there, you could have skipped a lot of stuff that never really sticks with you as the reader.

Cam: I mean, it kind of is a series of short stories in a way, just in one big novel.

Benny: Yeah, no numbers.

Rich: Like it just flows. It’s constantly interleaved. There’s no breaks. You don’t get cleanly delineated time jumps or anything. It just all merges endlessly together, which I think is the point.

Benny: No titles.

Rich: These are not even exactly criticisms. They’re more just like the thing that he’s trying to do and the way that it feels to engage with it. I think I was going to say, we could try and quickly speculate a couple of reasons why this hasn’t worked quite as well for us. One of them is obviously that people say this is a book that really captures the spirit of Latin America, the Latin American experience, and that is just an experience that we don’t have. And there’s a ton of parallels to Colombian history in here around — was it that you said, Benny? — the Thousand Days War, and then there was some political violence during García Márquez’s lifetime.

Cam: La Violencia, which shows a direct kind of thing that you can imagine from Márquez thinking of history repeating itself, right? It’s like, before my time, I heard about this Thousand Days War, which totally destroyed society — of conservatives and liberals hating each other. And then during my time, it seems to happen again.

Rich: 100%, yeah. So I think that would be very enriching if we were familiar with the history, and generally just the story of Latin America, how it was born, how it was influenced and shaped by the various colonial powers, and what life is like in rural small-town Colombia or any other number of Latin American countries. We don’t have that, and I think that could make a big difference.

Cam: I just think, even on that, the Colombian identity — I think at one point the author even talks around that these two intertwined families, the Buendías of Úrsula and José Arcadio, have been intertwined. I think he even says it’s like two races, right? And that’s potentially, you know — José Arcadio is a Spanish name, and I figure Úrsula’s maiden name is potentially a more indigenous-sounding name. But yeah, just this mixture of essentially the mestizo.

Rich: Yeah, Iguarán.

Benny: Iguarán, I think.

Rich: The crossover we never knew we knew. The other thing I wanted to say is, like, people might say, “oh, well, you guys didn’t read the book, you read an English translation of the book,” because I forgot to even mention that this is a book obviously written in Spanish, and we all read it in English. I don’t actually think that’s a big factor here for two reasons. One is because it’s written in modern Spanish, and it translates really nicely into English actually. Translation is always fraught for things like idioms, puns, wordplay — there’s no getting around those problems. But in Spanish and English, because they have such common heritage, there’s very direct cognates for so many words. It translates very cleanly, and the grammatical structure is similar. So I spot-checked a few bits. It was too hard for me to read completely.

Cam: I speak Spanish, motherfucker. And I did.

Rich: I mean, I don’t speak it well enough to really weigh in. But everyone knows that there’s lots of perfect cognates in Spanish as well as lots of non-perfect ones because of the Latin roots. And more convincingly, perhaps — García Márquez signed off on this translation, and I think he said that it’s maybe even better than his work or something. He said something very positive about it. And this is a guy who’s picky about adaptations of his work. So yes, I’m sure it’s technically in some sense better to read it in Spanish. I just read a few pages, and Phoebe’s reading it in Spanish, and she said — she actually, I think, quit halfway through. So yeah, anyway.

Cam: Yeah, I mean, Márquez’s quote must not be true, but imagine being the translator. That would be a pretty baller thing for the author to have said about your work.

Rich: Yes. He has this really consistent philosophy, I think — I was reading some interviews with him. It’s a good interview in the Paris Review. He definitely has this impressionistic approach to life, which I think supports our reading of this book. He’s not particularly interested in Western intellectualism or perfect factual accuracy for things. Because he’s a journalist by vocation, and the interviewer is asking him, “what’s the difference between journalism and fiction?” And he’s saying, no, it’s the same thing. I don’t think there is any difference. The sources are the same. The material is the same. The resources and language are the same. And so he’s talking about the way that you should do an interview. He objects to the use of tape recorders. He says the way that you should do it is you have an interview — direct human connection — without having to record the exact words spoken. And then afterwards you reminisce about it, and you conjure up an impression of how the conversation went and how it felt, not using the exact words. And you interpret it with a certain loyalty to the character of the person you’re speaking to, and so on. And this is his method of journalism, which is very interesting to read about as a former journalist.

Cam: Truth of facts, truth of feeling.

Rich: Yeah, exactly.

Cam: Truth of fiction.

Benny: This is — Sofía, or what is it?

Rich: Mimi.

Cam: One of the kids is…

Rich: It’s truer than true.

Benny: It’s truer than true. Yeah.

Cam: Renata. Renata is called Mimi, isn’t she? One of the kids’ nicknames.

Rich: Meme, meme. Yeah.

Cam: Or Meme.

Benny: Yeah, good shit. Yeah, I shudder at that description of journalism. That freaks me right out. But you know, to each their own, whatever.

Rich: Well, it makes the banana story extra funny too, right? Where you just like wrote an actual fictionalized book and then it somehow circled back into the general historical accounts of what happened. So I think he’d be quite pleased with that.

Benny: Yeah, they picked it up. Jeez. Alright, well, any closing thoughts?

Cam: No, not really.

BIG SUMMER BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Rich: I’m happy to leave it there. I’m so hyped to find out what book we’re reading next. So Benny, it’s your turn to pack.

Benny: Alright, we’re doing a big one, boys, because that’s what this book club started with, and that’s what we do every summer. So next book is Anna Karenina.

Cam: Nice, cool.

Rich: Oh, holy shit. When you said “big book” I was scared, but this is the best. I think it’s one of the best possible titles that could follow from that.

Cam: Big books.

Benny: I think we can’t — we’re coming up on two years, I guess, of the book club. I guess we passed two years. We started in May 2023, I guess. We better finally read a big book. I feel like we gotta read some Tolstoy. It’s just embarrassing if we go too much longer without diving in. And we did Crime and Punishment last summer — that was kind of our big summer book that we dove into. And I figure Anna Karenina would be a good one for this summer. So buckle up, unless there’s any vetoes I guess.

Cam: That sounds good.

Rich: No veto from me.

Cam: I’ll just have to buy another book now.

Benny: What did you think it was going to be?

Cam: I got my prediction wrong.

Benny: Oh, you thought it was going to be Man Without Qualities.

Rich: Yeah, that’s what I was scared of.

Benny: Is that what you were alluding to, Rich?

Cam: Which I was less worried about than Richard.

Rich: A book without quality.

Benny: I’m just gonna have to read that on my own I guess, you fuckers.

Rich: So how did you choose between Anna Karenina and War and Peace? And which one is longer? Did you just go with the shorter one?

Cam: War and Peace is like a thousand and Karenina is like 700 to 800.

Rich: Oh, thank you for the merciful choice.

Benny: Yeah, Karenina is shorter. I also, to be honest, just looked up — I just kind of basically took internet opinion about which one’s better to read first, and it seems like the rough consensus is that Karenina is the one to start with. So, game on.

Rich: Oh yeah, I’m excited. Let’s do it.

Benny: I think we’ll just start reading it and then make a call about how often we want to meet, how many pages we want to do, etc. I honestly haven’t even cracked it open, so I’m not sure how difficult it is to read or anything. I don’t know if we’re in Crime and Punishment territory or if it’ll be easier or harder. Should we settle on a translation, actually? I’ve heard they’re the best, and it really matters.

Cam: Yeah, we’re thinking Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Rich: Hell yeah. I can’t wait to do our entire first episode as translation discourse.

Benny: Alright, well, I’m stoked.

Cam: Yeah, sounds good.

Rich: Cool. Alright. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Please write in to us — doyouevenlit@gmail.com — that’s “do you”, just the letter “u”, “even lit” at gmail.com. We’d love to hear what you think, how we horribly butchered this amazing Nobel Prize-winning book. We’re definitely open to criticism and want to know what other people got from it. Otherwise we’ll see you for Anna Karenina. See you next week, bye guys.

Cam: See ya.

Benny: So yeah.