simply beautiful.

The following passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude is strikingly beautiful. It reads: “…Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets the rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an ed, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her” (255).

Remedios the Beauty is the only character that remains unaffected by Macondo’s change with the introduction of capitalism and the Banana Company. Because she unaware, or perhaps just oblivious to capitalism, she represents purity, and with this purity comes beauty. Remedios the Beauty is the opposite of fraudulence and greed. By making her float to heaven, Garcia Marquez seems to be saying that she is inhuman and other-worldly in that she has the miraculous ability to completely shut out capitalism and continue living her life of purity and free of corruption. She is an unrealistic being. Greed, money, power are all aspects of human nature. Since the beginning of civilization, people have tried to resist these temptations, yet they always succumb to these evils.

I feel the novel is a testament to Western economies and their overwhelming ability to taint and destroy developing nations. The novel is timeless and I can only expect it to become more relevant as time continues on.