After last month’s column, a reader wrote to me recommending the Netflix adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, adding that “most people in India claim to have read the book when in reality, only a few have!”I have not watched the adaptation yet (I intend to), but the comment took me back to the magic unrealism of my grad years, when not just reading Marquez, but enjoying it more than the next person, was a competitive sport among English Honours students.Now that we are all adults in remarkably magic-less times, I asked my friends and colleagues about the book, and many said they tried it but found it dense or simply nonsensical.So, if you have ever been curious about Marquez, or magic realism, or wondered what the fuss around him was about, here’s a primer.What is 100 Years of Solitude about?The 1967 novel is about several generations of the Buendia family who live and die in a fictional town called Macondo (based on Aracataca, Marquez’s hometown in Colombia). The sons are repeatedly named Jose Arcadio and Aureliano, while the daughters are often Amaranta, Remedios, or Ursula. The names are associated with specific traits that are passed down the family.The story can be seen as a closed loop if you look at the plot — the first Buendia founds Macondo, the town is destroyed along with the last Buendia. It is an infinite chain if you look at the patterns — the Buendias make the same universal mistakes, fall for the same temptations, and manage the same universally coveted triumphs over and over again.As the Buendias fall in love, go to war, cheat the town, flirt with dictatorship, feed the needy, die for a cause, commit incest, etc., ghosts come and go, yellow flowers fall from the sky, a murdered man’s spilled blood runs across streets to reach his mother, characters ascend to the skies, rain falls for four years straight, babies are born with a pig’s tail, etc.Story continues below this adThe everyday and the fantastical get the same straight-faced treatment from the narrator, a technique known as magic realism.Also Read | A beginner’s guide to magic realismMany writers before and after Marquez have used this technique, but such was his phenomenal success that magic realism is most closely associated with him and with Latin American literature.What is so great about 100 Years of Solitude?The vigour and colour of Marquez’s writing is the first. The book is a rioting fever dream, while also being a dead-straight narration of Colombia’s political and economic history. That is the genius of Marquez — behind the red hazes and yellow butterflies is the cold, hard light he shines on how Colombia has been exploited and manipulated, first by colonial Spain, and then by American capital backed with American guns.In the book, the striking workers of a banana plantation are invited to negotiate, and then hemmed in from all sides and shot. A Buendia survives the massacre, only to find that no one else in the town believes it ever happened. The incident is based on the Banana Massacre of December 1928 in Colombia’s Cienaga, when striking workers of the American United Fruit Company were killed by the Colombian military.Story continues below this ad Church of San José in Aracataca and statue of Gabriel García Márquez. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)You will struggle with the book if you try to read it as a logical beginning-middle-and-end plot. But if you take everything that happens at face value and just roll with the cascading events, you will enjoy beautiful, boisterous writing that loves and celebrates life, that holds the heartbreaking and the slapstick with equal ease, that questions what is reality and who gets to define it.Why did magic realism have such a moment with Marquez’s book?Magic realism can seem like fairy tales for adults. Why introduce a talking hand or a floating head when the story can progress just fine without it?In the hands of masters like Marquez or Salman Rushdie, magic realism is a way for the historically exploited communities to reclaim their voice. What is reality when governments write narratives and rewrite history? When those questioning the powerful are made to disappear both literally and from official records, isn’t remembering them like summoning a ghost?Countries of the Global South have often been caught in currents not of their own making, through colonisation or exploitation of natural resources or through ‘civilising’ missions from the West. Their history has been written by the victors, where the lens has been exoticising or denigrating or both. To the West, ‘crazy’ things happen in these fecund, febrile, felonious lands. But the happenings are ‘crazy’ precisely because the forces that set them in motion take no responsibility for them.Story continues below this adThus, in 100 Years, an insomnia plague spreads across Macondo, which makes residents lose their memories. They try to hold onto reality by labelling everything. An outsider who sees a cow wearing a board saying “this is a cow, she gives milk” can conclude the town is simple-minded, when it is making a heroic effort to stay rooted as reality collapses around it.In the post-colonial 20th century, writers from these lands found magic realism a useful vehicle to convey the alienation and senselessness of their past. As Marquez himself said in his Nobel lecture, “…our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.” Gabriel García Márquez (second from left) and his family with Queen Silvia and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at the Nobel Banquet in the Stockholm City Hall, Sweden, on December 10, 1982. (Photo gallery: The Nobel Banquet 1982)The genius of Marquez did much to plant the magic realism flag on the literary summit. Its prestige began to dip around the end of the 20th century as authors began to sprinkle it across all sorts of books, not just the ones where the bleakness of the reality needed magic to make sense of it. Within Latin America too, younger authors fought what they thought was the exoticising effect of magic realism. But the genre carries on, to mixed success.I personally, for example, loved the magic realism in Shehan Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almedia, but found it annoyingly navel-gazey in Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: If Sally Rooney’s characters had desi parentsIf you’d like to try magic realism for the first time, my recommendation for Indian readers would be Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, because you would be familiar with the ‘magical’ events he is referring to.If you would like to try Marquez for the first time, my recommendation would be Chronicle of a Death Foretold, because it has all of the magic and fewer of the minefields of 100 Years of Solitude.See you on October 31,Yours Literarily,Yasheeyashee.s@indianexpress.comP.S: If you love books, write to me with what work I should discuss next. If you are not a reader of novels, follow along, and maybe you will begin to delight in the wonder and wisdom, the practical value, and the sheer joy of fiction.