25th Aug 2023 • Saqib
OHYS is an immensely captivating book, I was taken away by its magic as soon as I started reading it, and it was back in the winter of 2021. Until now, I only heard of OHYS and the magic realism genre. However, I read some books of this genre before, for example, Haruki Murakami’s ‘Kafka on the shore’ and ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’, and Salman Rushdie’s “Haroun Rasheed and the sea of stories”. They were fascinating books with something radically different from traditional books to tell. I read OHYS and found it no different.
The mysteries that Márquez has incorporated into the novel in unending. There are such mysteries that you read about it in the first chapter, and they get unveiled in the last chapter. This is also one of the reasons why I wanted to create the Trivia section. With the help of trivia, readers will be able to understand the Novel better. The trivia section features many hidden details about the characters and their intertwined lives.
One of my favourite mysteries in the novel is the seventeen sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendia. While in the war, Colonel Aureliano Buendia slept with a number of women and fathered seventeen sons. They came to Buendia house in Macondo one by one, and Ursula baptized all of them with the same name, Aureliano. Now, the fact worth noticing is the manner of their death. One of the fascinating things about the Buendia Family is that it repeats itself every generation. So, the seventeen Aurelianos get shot down in alike manner, in the middle of their forehead.
That brings us to the next section of the blog that is inner-references, which is another feature of Marques’ production.
The novel unto itself has numerous references at various points of the family saga, breaking the time and place barriers. The begging chapters refer to something that is going to occur in the middle of the novel, and the ending chapters refer to something in the beginning of the novel. In this series, one incident that is referred to time and again and sure is an important part of the novel is the Colonel Aureliano Buendia facing the firing squad. The novel opens with the same incident when Colonel Aureliano is facing the firing squad, and he remembers his father, Jose Arcadio Buendia, in the afternoon when he discovered ice.
The inner references add to the existing mystery of the novel and make it more interesting by showing how the events in the novel reoccur with the passing of each generation and eventually lead to their destruction by the seventh generation. Though painful, it was evident from the first chapter of the novel that the Buendia family was going to destroy itself in time to come. Marques makes it more evident and interesting by linking the parts of the novel to others and making the reader realize that the consequences that the Buendia family faces are their own doing.
Reading Márquez is one of the best things that I have done in my unproductive winter days. That’s what motivated my to create a wiki so that I can systematically document everything that’s happening in the novel. I will write more on the blog but for now, adios.
