Since the pandemic began I noticed a change in my reading habits. I have been revisiting many books that I have read before – ten titles to be exact. This contrasts with the period of 2017-2019, when I reread only a single book: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I did try to reread Catch-22 in preparation of the Hulu six-episode adaption of the Heller book, but found it unbearable.
Was this just a comfort-in-the-familiar thing, a dearth of books to choose from (doubtful), or was there something else in play?
Rereading The Plague (1948) in the Spring of 2020 made sense, but I should have paid closer attention to the timeline of the bubonic plague in Albert Camus’ Oran. Like many, I thought COVID-19 would recede in the fall, but in The Plague the epidemic lasted over a year. In January, I reread Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) which examined how the young nation coped with the 600,000 deaths in the Civil War. This provided some context to what we are currently experiencing with the fatalities in the United States from the coronavirus. I did some "processing" in the essay “The Current Republic of Suffering.”
Gabriel García Márquez
While visiting family and vacationing in Puerto Rico, I brought a yellowed, trade paperback of Gabriel García Márquez’s classic One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In the picture above, I am reading the book to one of the many stray cats who lounge near the Governor's Mansion in old San Juan.
Obviously there are limits to the number of books you can take on trip so you better make sure your selection is a good one. Except for being impressed with García Márquez’s magical realism, I didn’t remember many details from my first reading over 30 years ago. I recalled there was a character who ate soil when she was upset, a lot of characters with close to the same name, and the long, rain which almost wiped out the village of Macondo, Columbia where the book is set.
A new reading revealed much more with several themes that resonate today.
For example, one pivotal plot point in the novel is when the banana plantation owners (representing capitalism) surround the protesting laborers including women and children and machine gun them down. The dead bodies are loaded into boxcars and hauled to the coast where they are dumped into the sea without a trace. José Arcadio Segundo manages to survive and escape back to Macondo, where he tries to keep the memory of those slain alive. But the rich plantation owners obliterate all evidence of the massacre and deny it ever happened (like the Capitol insurrection). As if the gods are angry, the rains descend for years almost washing Macondo into oblivion, but the Word, through the efforts of José Arcadio Segundo lives on.
Solitude Defined
Since yellow, trade paperbacks are suitable for making notations, I started marking in the book how the characters lived in different types of solitude:
The solitude of grief: “She lost her mind over him (her dead lover). She could not sleep and she lost her appetite and sank so deep into solitude that even her father became an annoyance.”
The solitude of death: “He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest, without a single moment of betrayal, tormented by memories.”
The solitude of depression: “The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude."
The idea that we have all have a different definition of solitude makes more sense after pandemic enforced isolation. There is a difference between loneliness and being alone. For some it was maddening and unbearable (hence by the rise of alcohol consumption); others admitted they enjoyed hearing the birds when the traffic disappeared for a couple of months. It reminds me of my favorite line in Camus’ The Plague when the character Cottard who early in the novel is prevented from killing himself, admits to finding temporary peace of mind in the chaos. “Well, let’s put it like this, “says Cottard, "I’ve been feeling much more at ease here since the plague settled in.”
The insights gained in reading One Hundred Years of Solitude is not limited to understanding the solitude that envelops many of the characters, but rather in the end, it is the Word that endures as does this powerful, timeless masterpiece. Read on, book shoppers.
