The pillars of solitude

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I’ve just finished reading two “family saga” type novels: The pillars of the earth by Ken Follett, and One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

I saw both in bookshops and libraries quite a long time ago, but never got round to reading them. Then my son gave me The pillars of the earth for my birthday, and I read that, and followed it up by the other.

There are some similarities: both follow the fortunes of families in a fictitious small town over several generations, though the periods, circumstances and outcomes are very different.

The pillars of the earth is set in the fictitious English town of Kingsbridge in the medieval period, the reigns of King Stephen and Henry II, and the background is the building of a cathedral. It is the best of Ken Follett’s novels that I have read, and in the course of the story one learns quite a bit about methods of building. Historical events affect the building of the cathedral and the characters — political and ecclesiastical rivalry, civil war and famine provide the obstacles that the characters have to overcome in order to attain their goals.

One problem is that the characters are rather one-dimensional. Each seems to embody one main characteristic, which makes their behaviour rather predictable: the scheming and ambitious bishop, the selfish and violent usurping feudal lord, and so on.

One hundred years of solitude is set in the fictitious town of Macondo in Colombia, somewhere near the Caribbean coast, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Wider events in the country and the world impinge on the town. It, too, is affected by civil war and natural disasters, which affect the lives of the characters, though often in seemingly inconsequential ways. Independence means that people should patriotically paint their houses blue instead of white.

The characters are in some respects less one-dimensional than those in The pillars of the earth. They are more complex, yet they also have one thing in common — solitude. They are in many respects a dysfunctional family, unable to communicate with each other and the rest of the world, misinterpreting each other’s actions and reactions. Instead of building a cathedral, what is built is the town itself. The founder of the family was the founder of the town, leading people to settle in the place, and originally the houses are built in such a way as to ensure that everyone has an equal share of resources. But corruption within the family, and political and economic forces like capitalism change this. The fortunes of the town reflect the fortunes of the family, and the decline of one leads to the decline of the other.

One hundred years of solitude is not a straightforward historical novel like The pillars of the earth. Though many of the historical events (like the civil war) are real, the story is at times surreal, symbolic, and at times almost allegorical. One of the characters is a gypsy from outside the family whose ghost inhabits a room in the house, where his old manuscripts are stored. One of the family members tries to decipher the manuscripts, but when he finally manages to translate them into Spanish they are all in code, so he still cannot understand them.

At times the story is narrated with a wry kind of humour, which reminded me of another novel that I read some time ago, The poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, in which a Baptist missionary family from the USA find it hard to come to terms with the different culture and environment in a Congo village, and the crosscultural misunderstandings are described with a similar wry humour, and eventually the misunderstandings engulf the family itself, as each makes their own adaptation to the Congo village culture. Márquez describes misunderstandings within the family, which though sometimes exacerbated by events outside, are mainly internal to the family itself.

One of the things that appealed to me about One hundred years of solitude was that solitude leads to forgetfulness. Because the family cannot communicate, they cannot communicate their own history, and so forget it, as the town, and indeed the country, forget their history too. Sometimes it is deliberate, where one member of the family hides the origins of her own grandson, or where the memory of a massacre is obliterated by a government cover-up. But other things are forgotten by sheer family forgetfulness, where eventually no one can remember who it is that is shown in an old photograph.

I’m interested in family history, church history, general history, and a lot of that is real to me. A couple of years ago I discovered that some old family photos, kept in a wooden box in my study, were damaged by termites, but even then, many people in the photos are unknown; there is no one around to remember them. I’ve started some wiki pages on family history, and invited other family members to look at them and contribute to it so that we can recover and preserve the history of the family, but I wonder if any of them will. Márquez’s novel suggests that if people can’t communicate when living in the same house, they won’t do any better communicating across the world, even with modern technology like the internet.

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Tags: books, communication, family sagas, fiction, forgetfulness, Gabrtiel Garcia Márquez, historical novels, history, Ken Follett, literature, One hundred years of solitude, rememberance, The pillars of the earth