I found Cien Años de Soledad to be a very interesting and well thought out novel. It was very intriguing from start to finish and in my opinion the ending was a perfect one as it made a full circle or connection to the beginning. It started off with the incestuous relationship between Ursula and Jose Arcadio while ending with the incestuous relationship between Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula, resulting in a deformed child and the end of the Buendia family. This almost seemed inevitable as in the beginning Ursula and Jose Arcadio were worried that their child would bear signs of deformity. Also, incestuous relationships continued for the whole novel and the whole Buendia family (and Macondo) experienced a progressive destruction. It also seems that connections between the past and the present are seen throughout the book. For example, Meme enters a convent in the same town her mother came from.
As continuously stated in class, there seems to be a continued struggle to keep memories alive throughout the book and in the last section we continue to see this. Even though Jose Arcadio Segundo struggled to keep the massacre of the innocent plantation workers alive, their deaths were completely unacknowledged by the town, and instead forgotten and no trace of the banana plantation remained. Moreover, the destruction of Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes’ animals further showed the loss of the past. All in all, the eradiation of memory is predestined in this novel even though many characters try to conserve it by living in the past.
I definitely think this is a good book to end the course and would recommend it to others.
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I also thought that the ending to the novel was appropriate for the book, but I never connected it to the beginning. It is true that all the memories made by the Buendia family were struggling to be preserved in time like the town but as we see in the end "the cheese stands alone"
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