“There is always something left to love .”

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love, as it is said, is an essential part of the Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels. It is the second essential element after the much debated issue of magical realism. However, love evolves, flourishes, and spreads in every story Marquez tells.

Starting his career as a journalist in a Colombian daily, Marquez has produced a valuable intellectual resource through his writing. A man who once read the Metamorphosis by Kafka, decided to write in a surreal plot where the reader has to believe in spite of the facts. It is magical realism that decorates the surroundings in the stories produced by him. But everything is also surrounded by love.

Marquez always chose the stories of pandemic, war, separation, migration, colonialism and personal feud. The time when Marquez started writing, the South American continent was witnessing military coups, civil war, the fight between the liberals and other forces, rise of communism and despotism. He himself grew up in such surroundings with political unrest, and deteriorating economy. European colonies were fighting for their grounds and the economy was brutally fractured.

If an author weaves stories about such serious issues, we expect only bloodshed, vivid description of war, and political documentation. But Marquez not only discusses these issues with an ideological backing but tries the criteria of normalcy. He stretches out the personalities with their traits, humane and also barbaric. It is Marquez who imagines a love story during a pandemic. A love story in most unexpected situation. A love bonding mesmerized in his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that is widely acclaimed and seen as one of the greatest novels ever produced in world literature, demonstrates love with all its flavours and extent, purity and lust. A story about a family that settles in an alien land after a lengthy fight against natural calamities has many colours of human nature to express, most primarily love with seamless stretch, beyond bodies and relations.

Marquez’s fame is known with the fact that his novels are the second bestsellers across the world after Bible. Marquez is widely read, loved and regarded novelist of Latin American literature. Marquez was inspired by the literary beauty of magical realism. He was both praised as well as criticised for this literary device. Some critics term it as post colonial hangover. Although the real essence of Marquez’s writing lies in the descriptive presentation of sureal incidents that helps breaking the monotonous procession of the story.

Personally Marquez has a successful married life which sprouted through a love relationship since his school time. His wife has been a source of support in difficult times; when they had not a settled household; when spending 18 months of time on a book with no committed consequences; she was there with Marquez, known as the “writer of nostalgia.” We see the same support and care in Ursula, who cares his husband even when, he eventually, loses his senses and turns a lunatic. She never complains about his experiments, the unending hope of discovering alchemy. Love is all about acceptance and support. Ursula fits in the context.

The Colombian society is known for its vibrant facets. Its roots still connect the history to the present. People during the time of Marquez were superstitious and were very serious about fortune tellers, prophecies, and astrology. One of the Buendias fall in love with the fortune teller, crossing every limit of moral values and ransacking the personal space. Love also has a violent expression with the character Jose Arcadio who runs away with a Gypsy woman.

One Hundred Years of Solitude covers the lifespan of a family that built the small town, Macondo. The bloodline of the Buendias survives various generations and ends in a tragic way. A family that sees feuds, assassinations, betrayal, hysteria, blindness, and grief, also lacks the spirit of love. You may say Marquez uses love as an ointment, as a healing emotion to cure the brutality and savage values. A failed love makes a person jealous and bitter, like Amaranta, Ursula’s daughter, who dies a virgin. Her love affair with Pierto Crespi shatters as he lefts her for her sister. However, after a long time when he reappears and proposes again, Amaranta rejects him; in dejection Crespi kills himself. Colonel Buendia, son of Ursula and Jose Buendia, joins the army and fathers seven sons with seven different women. He never marries anyone.

There are also many intricate love stories in the novel which perpetually and validly show the diversity of love. Love can not only join people but also force to exile. With a timespan of one hundred years, the family looses its vitality and potential like the peeling off wall of an old house. Love loses its purity when incestuous relations flourish in dark shadowy spaces. When the predictions begin to realize, people quit their trust and join the battle against their own identities. A house shatters and a family comes to an end, devoid of the basic necessity of humanity, that is love.