The charm of magical realism is that it makes reality more enchanting and irrationality is explained away with recourse to the very nature of magical reality i.e. strange things happen for no reason and that it is perfectly fine. In reality one doesn’t have that luxury. Everything that happens has to have a reason otherwise it is an excruciating task to make oneself come to terms with the utter whimsical nature of life. Imagination is lifted to a higher altar and one keeps searching for a metaphor to the strangeness which engulfs the pages, often bewildered at no such causation, possible explanation or subtle hint at the occurring of events in the narrative. Frustrating. Right, but it frees one from the moors and norms that the society has placed on us and made us mere droids to repeat the indelible code according to which life must be lived and to which reality must be adhered to.

The master of the craft of magical realism Gabriel Garca Marquez draws strange shapes on paper that on deep inspection reveal layers upon layers of meaning, teleporting you to a country where the magical spells as we know are trivialized by the colossal violation of the reality which we know – something happens which is magical even for magical realism. A cyclical story of privation, misery, blood, violence, gluttony, voracious passions, humbling intellect, angelic spirt and diabolic souls is weaved through the one hundred years of existence of Buendia family. Each character is epitome of a human quality – good or bad – stretched to the infinite limits. And where each one tries to break from the shackles of destiny of his or her race, but they forget that futility is another trait common to their line along with the one he or she is blessed with.

Maddening curiously of the founder of the line is followed by his deep recess to the abyss of decrepitude. The languor of one son is overcome by unbridled passion and ferocious violence that make the foundations of the state trimmer by the mere mention of his name. The diligence of the other son metamorphoses into a raw and bestial nature. The daughter is haunted by measureable love but boundless cowardice, and who throughout her life burns with passion inside, but is held by her cowardice to let a man enter her intimate self. Rebecca is a manifestation of fierce passion through and through; she would jump heavens by the calling of her desire and would happily accept any misery that the pursuit of her desires brings – even if the misery is of being banished from the world and condemned to living a life of a hermit unaware of the tumult of life which surrounds you.

The incapacity of Colonel Aureliano for love and the inability to think of anything else other than his haunting sense of boredom and state of complete disinterest is unleashed over the world through his thirty-two wars, which were a ruse of high-sounding slogans of freedom for his vanity and pride. I can say the word ‘ironically’ but then there are no ironies in magical realism that his son beams with unbridled love, untrammeled desire and annihilating passion – he would follow his father in war to escape from the calling of his flesh and senility of his mind and ecstasy of his soul. But the fate of Buendias is inescapable and he has to return to his natural state of being an apparition of unsaid desires, nostalgia, boundless yearning and stoic surrender to the tyranny of his line.

Unceasing frolicking, gentle caressing, nauseating amount of love-making are only shadowed by the description of how memory works and how collective memory is easy to erase and redirect. The one thing which runs as background theme to every story is that meekness of humans is just a ploy to not be consumed by the fires of passions and desires. And meekness is the fate which follows volcanic rupture of passions any way. So meekness may not be sidelined to human story after all; and why we detest meekness so much is because, may be, just may be, meekness is our ultimate destiny – in face of death or submissiveness to solitude. And that those whose fate is written by apocalyptic hands of a man from far away will vanish when they understand their fate and when there is no time. And that fate could have been avoided if one in the line before the last one had persevered to decode the end of his line.