100YS Chapter 20

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

• Pilar dies and is buried in her rocker.  I was a little surprised she outlived Úrsula.  I wrongly guessed that the book would end with Úrsula’s death.
• Classic Word of the Day candidate: incunabula
• Aureliano’s friends are leaving Macondo, including the wise Catalonian.
• Just because it mentions Michigan: “the girl in the red sweater painting watercolors by a lake in Michigan who waved at him with her brushes, not to say farewell but out of hope, because she did not know that she was watching a train with no return passing by.”
• Gaston returns to Brussels, leaving Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula to do a family repeat in the fashion of Jose Arcadio and Rebeca.
• Gaston peacefully abandons his marriage only to request his bike.
• Aureliano seeks to find out who his mother is,but not from the priest who says that he’s simply named after Buendia Street.
• The couple births a baby boy with a pig’s tail.  Amaranta Ursula bleeds to death and the baby is carried away by red ants.
• Melquiades’ scrolls become clear.  It is the end of Aurealiano.  The end of Macondo.

 

100 YS Chapter 19

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

• A married Amaranta Úrsula returns to Macondo with a wealthy, bug-studying, bicycle-riding, plane flying, leash-wearing husband named Gaston.
• Ama. Úr. and Gaston love each other–everywhere.
• She spends her time repairing the house.  He spends his time embracing the culture.
• Gaston of Aureliano:  “… he did not buy the books in order to learn but to verify the truth of his knowledge…”  
• Because Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems to fixate on inappropriate relationships, Aureliano has a thing for Amaranta Ursula.
• Nigromanta–her name sounds an awful lot like Amaranta–is Aureliano’s substitute for Amaranta Úrsula.
• Aureliano makes four friends.  ( I really hope these young men aren’t the ones who murdered José Arcadio.)
• The wise Catalonian is the owner of the bookstore.  He used to be a classical literature prof.
• Gaston’s plane still hasn’t arrived and Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula’s conncetion grows.
• Pilar Tenera recognizes Aurealiano as a Buendia by “the pox of solitude” and she understand his heart because the “history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions…”
• Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula’s silent fight turns to sex.

 

100YS Chapter 18

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

• Meme’s Aureliano studies Sanskrit at Melquiades’ request so he can read the parchments.
• When Melquiades no longer appears,the magic of the room is gone.
• After Aureliano Segundo dies, Petra Cotes secretly sends Fernanda a basket of food.  The charity is meant to humiliate the woman who humiliated her.
• Sofia de la Piedad has been more servant than family member.  When the house turns against her, she leaves.
• Even though Aureliano is in Melquiades’ room, Fernanda eats alone in the dining room facing “fifteen empty chairs“.  She’s still queen.
• Is it elves or old age responsible for the misplaced items in the house? In 100YS it could be either.
• Fernanda dies.  Aureliano preserves her body for four months until José Arcadio returns home.
• Aureliano ventures out to the bookshop.  The bookshop owner has “eyelids contracting like two clams”.  I’m not sure exactly how to imagine that, but I like the thought.
• José Arcadio has creepy dreams of Amaranta.
• The letters he and his mother Fernanda had exchanged were all lies.
• To combat the fears J.A. had acquired as a child, he invites the children of Macondo to play/destroy at the house.  This section has additional creepy parts, but they do find the St. Joseph gold in Úrsula’s room.
• J.A. finally drives four kids out of the house.
• J.A. and Aureliano form a bond of sorts: “That drawing closer together of two solitary people of the same blood was far from friendship, but it did allow them both to bear up better under the unfathomable solitude that separated and united them at the same time.”
• The last of the 17 Aurealianos appears, is rejected at the Buendia home, and is promptly shot by 2 police officers that have been chasing him all this time.
• The four whipped boys drown J.A. in his bath and take the gold.  It’s disturbing.

 

100YS Chapter 17

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

• “Úrsula had to make a great effort to fulfill her promise to die when it cleared”
• She cleans; she restores; she debugs.
• After all this time José Arcadio Segundo is still alive in Melquiades’ room.
• Aureliano Segunda’s back to living with his mistriss.  The raffles are back in business.   $ is no longer squandered but carefully budgeted.
• I’m noticing more and more the use of the word solitude/solitary.
• Úrsula is no longer lucid.  Age has shriveled her; she “looked like a newborn old woman”.
• We have another Monty Python moment

“Poor great-great-grandmother,” Amaranta Ursula said.  “She died of old age.”
Ursula was startled.
“I’m alive!” she said.
“You can see,” Amaranta Ursula said, suppressing her laughter, “that she’s not even breathing.”
“I’m talking!” Ursula shouted.
“She can’t even talk,” Aureliano said, “She died like a little cricket.”
Then Ursula gave in to the evidence.  “My God,” she exclaimed in a low voice, “So this is what it’s like to be dead.”

• On Good Friday, at the age of 115 or 122 (It’s hard to say exactly) Ursula died.
• Her steamy funeral reminded me of another steamy funeral.  Remember when  Meursault’s mother was laid to rest?
• A monster is responsible for the bird plague.  The set a trap that catches and kills the Wandering Jew.
• People are dying all over the place.  Rebeca’s dead, found with her finger in her mouth.
• Fernanda has invisible surgery by telepathic doctors.
• A2 is dying.  He works feverishly to earn enough money to send Amaranta Úrsula to Brussels.  I thought it interesting that he earns enough money to cover all expenses except for her fare back home.
• Both A2 and JA2 die.  At the same time.  Once again they look identical.  The drunk men who carried the coffins mixed them up and the twins are buried in the wrong graves.  How the relatives know this, I do not know.

 

100YS Chapter 16

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-15

Chapter 16

•  Rain has been falling in Macondo for almost five years.
• Fernanda points out the fixations of the Buendia family members:  Aureliano Segundo has home repairs; Amaranta has her shroud; José Arcadio has Melquiades’ parchments; and Úrsula has her memories.
• How disgusting was it that Úrsula’s back was paved with leeches!
• I drew a little whale next to the line when Aureliano Segundo remember reading Melquiades’ stories about “flying carpets and whales that fed on entire ships and their crews.”  I do miss Moby-Dick.
• Úrsula’s waiting for the rain to stop so she can die.  Considerate of her.
• A2’s livestock is dying in the floods.
• Petra Cotes and Fernanda are running out of food.
• Fernanda spends a day ranting.  A2’s reaction is to smash posts and dishes, but then he goes out for food.
• Úrsula’s confusing the past and present.  Will the gold from the St. Joseph statues ever be found?
• Trying to make a comeback from the destruction of the livestock, Petra Cotes raffles off her last mule.

 

100YS Chapter 15

One Hundred Years of Solitude

 Chapters 1-10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

 

Chapter 15

• Fernanda keeps Meme’s son a secret.
• Fernanda takes Meme to her childhood home where Meme recognizes the ghost of her grandfather.  The next day the silent woman is delivered to a convent where she would never speak but always remember “Mauricio Babilonia, his smell of grease, and his halo of butterflies…”
• Fernanda is telepathically treated for an illness she won’t describe by invisible doctors.  Really.
•  The banana workers strike when the officials use trickery to deal with the workers’ complaints.
• José Arcadio Segundo predicts his own death.
• The military is brought in to deal with the strike by shooting the workers.  JA2 is shot, but his prediction does not come true.  He witnesses the dead being packed into a train.  He is the only survivor.
• JA2 walks back to Macondo where no one believes him about the massacre.
• Soldiers searching the house cannot see JA2 hiding in Melquiades’ room.
• Col. A.B used to talk the glory of war with JA2:  “He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear.”  Our friend Henry Fleming from The Red Badge of Courage would have agreed.

 

100YS Chapter 14

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

• Meme finishes her musical studies.
• When did Fernanda start corresponding with invisible doctors?  I missed something.
• Amaranta’s not only sewing her own shroud by Death’s orders, but she’s made one for Rebeca too.
• Since Death has told Amaranta exactly when she’s going to die, Amaranta offers to take mail to the townspeople’s deceased.
• Seemingly healthy Amaranta lies on her death-bed and requests a mirror.  Do you remember when Madame Bovary asked for a mirror after receiving last rites?
• Meme’s up to something with the yellow butterfly man.  Something that requires secret meetings, the advice of Pilar Ternera, and mustard plasters.
• Fernanda puts together the pieces.  The mayor’s guard is set to catch a chicken thief and instead shoots the Butterfly Man in the back as he creeps into the bathroom “where Meme was waiting for him, naked and trembling with love among the scorpions and butterflies as she had done almost every night for the past few months.”  Senior Garcia Marquez paints a striking image with these words.

 

100YS Chapter 13

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

• Úrsula’s gone blind.  She’s done so so successfully that no one knows.
• Her blindness allows her to see her family’s flaws:
• Col. Aureliano Buendia is “a man incapable of love.”
• Amaranta’s action were “a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice”.
• Her adopted child, Rebeca, was “the only one who had the unbridled courage that Úrsula had wanted for her line.”
• José Arcadio leaves for the seminary.
• Fernanda loses her husband to his concubine and becomes “a widow whose husband has still not died”.
• Aureliano Segundo invites The Elephant (Camila Sagastume) to compete in an eating contest with him.  The XL voice teacher with the delicate manners eats A2 under the table.  A2 thinks he’s going to die, but he recovers, not in his mistress’ home, but in the home of his wife.
• Classic Word of the Day: proboscidian
• Amaranta has taken up weaving her own funeral shroud.  That’s not weird at all.  She  seemed to “carry the cross of ashes of virginity on her forehead”  Nifty connection to your own book, Mr. Marquez.
• Col. Aureliano is making and melting down golden fish, but only when he’s not burning his dead wife’s dolls.
• Meme has gone to school to study the clavichord.  Her mother Fernanda tries to hide her husband’s infidelity, but Meme knows.
• Meme seems to be the only Buendia that hasn’t revealed “the solitary fate of the family and she seemed entirely in conformity with the world…“
• Like her father, Meme loves a good party.  she invites four nuns and sixty-eight classmates to home.
• Col. Aureliano dies in “miserable solitude” under the chestnut tree.

 

100YS Chapter 12

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

• Shortly after the arrival of the train in chapter 11, a movie theater comes to Macondo. Oh, the fraud of Hollywood.
• Lonely for his chestnut tree, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s ghost returns.
• Banana research and a gringo invasion:  what else is coming to Macondo.
• Why does the Buendia Family feed all the strangers that pour into the home?
• Remedios the Beauty really does try to discourage the attention of her followers but this only seems to make her more desirable.  A man removes tiles from the bathroom roof to watch her bathe.  Over and over she warns him that he will fall, and he does–to his death.
• It seems that Remedios the Beauty has powers of death.  Is the amber-colored oil/scent she gives off really rotting whale?
• Sixteen of Col. a.B.’s sons are murdered during the course of a week.  Only Aureliano Amador escapes into the mountains.
• Never again will a Buendia receive the imposition of ashes.
• Instead of sorrow over the loss of his sons, Col. Aurealiano feels rage.

 

100YS Chapter 11

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapters 1-10

Chapter 11

• Fernanda, the refined young lady, is raised to be queen.
• I can’t even talk about her nightgown.
• Fernanda’s father mails her Christmas gifts.  The final gift is his own corpse.
• The President of the Republic wants to give Col. Aureliano the Order of Merit.  He wants to part of it or the Jubilee celebration.
• Col. A.B.’s seventeen sons come for the Jubilee.  Aureliano Segundo likes his wild cousins and much partying commences.
• What does wild partying get you?  An indelible Ash Wednesday Cross on your forehead.  Now there’s a constant reminder that “Dust you are and to dust you will return.”  All but two of the brothers leave Mocando.
• Surprisingly, after years of isolation Rebeca’s still alive.  Rebeca “… had needed many years of suffering and misery in order to attain the privileges of solitude…”  privileges of solitude?  Hmmmm  I’ll have to ponder that.