THE MALAYALIS OF MACONDO

As One Hundred Years of Solitude drops on Netflix, TMS takes a look at the Malayali's admiration for Gabriel García Márquez—from Delhi to Kottayam

- KRISHNA P S

Time doesn’t flow linearly in Macondo. It’s circular, fluid — seven generations of the Buendía family live and eventually disappear off the face of the earth. Time alone bears witness to this Magical town by the river, founded by patriarch José Arcadio Buendía, who dreamt of a city of Mirrors.

Often regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century, Gabriel García Márquez’s Masterpiece, One hundred Years of Solitude, transforms Macondo into a sprawling character on its own. In Macondo, the only visitors from the outside world were gypsies, who travel to the isolated town once a year, drawn by José’s scientific curiosity. It is they who introduce ice to Macondo. As José turns insane, his wife Úrsula becomes the Matriarch who ties the Buendia family together. The story expands with his son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who fathers 17 sons with 17 women, some of them incestuous. And the tale of Macondo unfolds through a Multi-generation saga, with layers of Latin American politics over 100 years. everything in Macondo is surreal — children are born with tails and butterflies hover overhead like clouds. And reading this Magical realist novel becomes a Meditative act.

Published in Spanish in 1967, buzz about the novel reached Kerala’s shores in the 1970s through M T Vasudevan Nair’s American travelogues. The first Malayalam translation of the novel appeared in the 1980s, and since then, Márquez has become a writer loved like no other among Malayalis. A popular joke in Kerala’s literary circle used to be that Márquez was “the best-known Malayali writer in Latin America” and “the first Malayali novelist who won the Nobel”.