The Bus, the Book, and the Buendía Family

One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Book Review

The Bus to Macondo

It began on an early morning bus rattling along the Santa Barbara coast. I was a bleary-eyed college student clutching my backpack, barely awake as the Pacific fog burned off. A fellow student next to me was thumbing through a dog-eared paperback with a bright yellow cover. Curiosity got the better of me. “What’s that you’re reading?” I mumbled. With a half-smile, she held up the book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. At that moment, I had no inkling that this chance encounter on a commute to campus would open a door into a world as fantastical and haunting as my groggy dreams.

She offered to lend it to me, insisting I had to experience Márquez’s masterpiece. I flipped through the first pages as the bus bounced along. The very first line stopped me in my tracks: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”. I read it twice, letting the magical sentence settle. A colonel facing a firing squad… remembering ice? It was an odd, poetic hook – one that felt both ironic and profound. By the time we reached campus, I’d accepted the book with a mix of gratitude and suspicion. I joked that it sounded like a hundred years would take a hundred years to read, but Gabriel (the student, not the author – and me, another Gabriel, caught in between) was already drawn into Márquez’s spell.

Under the Gypsy’s Spell

Instead of studying for a grammar test that afternoon, I found myself on the campus lawn cracking open the novel in earnest. Soon, I was introduced to Macondo, an embryonic village by a clear river where “the world was so recent that many things lacked names.” In those early chapters, a band of gypsies arrived in town with marvels like magnets and ice, led by a gypsy sage named Melquíades. Through the eyes of José Arcadio Buendía – Macondo’s founder and patriarch – I too felt the shock of discovery. The patriarch traded his mules for magnet bars, dreaming of pulling gold from the earth, and later obsessed over alchemy and inventions to the point of madness. His imagination and hubris were enthralling and a little bit madcap, and I couldn’t help but smirk at how seriously he took the gypsy’s tall tales. It was as if Márquez was winking at me through the pages; a gentle nudge reminding me that wonder and folly often walk hand in hand.