One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez
The novel tells the story of seven generations of one family. I spent an entire afternoon finishing it—but finishing is all I can claim to have done. I imagine I will return to this book in ten years, and again in fifty.
A sense of solitude and helplessness ran through the whole reading experience. The characters fear loneliness, yet remain immersed in their own particular solitude, unable to escape. Their destinies seem to be pulled toward an inevitable conclusion. The manuscript given to the first patriarch by the gypsy is fulfilled: “The first of the family will be tied to a tree, and the last is being eaten by ants.”
The Rusty Lake games are probably an homage to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Their storytelling feels strikingly similar: they, too, follow the fates of several generations of a family. “My daughter will return to Rusty Lake.” Reincarnation completes the cycle, and the prophecy is fulfilled.
I read the sections after the first Úrsula's death rather hastily. My knowledge is limited, especially my understanding of history, so I will quote a passage with which I strongly agree:
Among the women in the novel, Úrsula embodies the maternal spirit of the entire family and witnesses almost all of its history. She is the family's pillar, its founding mother—and, by extension, the founding mother of humanity—possessing almost every virtue associated with women. When her husband withdraws from the male-dominated order, she establishes a female-led order that both inherits and negates it. In fact, Úrsula is the true founder of the human world, not only in the sense of giving life, but also in the sense of establishing order. She rejects male barbarity and absurdity and brings civilization into being: she “found the route to the great inventions that her husband had failed to discover on his unsuccessful expedition.” With “the same enthralled passion as her husband,” she builds a home and addresses the basic needs of human survival, while her husband “waits for God to appear amid the turmoil.”
When that pillar collapses, the thread holding the family together seems to snap. Its members scatter like loose sand, powerless to resist the fate that carries them toward destruction.
Prosperity and decline, fervor and desolation, hope and despair, warmth and solitude—the whole range of human experience is compressed into this single book. A few pages pass beneath my fingertips, and decades have slipped by. The impact is so intense that even after putting the book down, I cannot settle my thoughts for a long time. Within the vast current of history, faced with a fate that seems almost certain, human beings are so small. It is impossible not to feel a deep melancholy.
Wherever you go, you should remember that the past is false, that memory is a road without an end, that all the springs that once existed are gone, and that even the most tenacious and frenzied love is, in the end, only a fleeting reality. Only solitude is eternal.