With Thanksgiving just out the door the mass preparations for Christmas have begun. Most people will spend their holidays amidst family, hopefully resulting in a few unforgettable days. Unfortunately family dynamics also admits lesser situations once in a while, ranging from small fights to major wars; it’s safe to say that everybody knows. In The Netherlands there are at least two television shows that aim to reunite broken families, often resulting in popular television. But what has literature to say about the institute of family? Today a comparison of two well known books that might seem different at the surface, but show some similarities at their core; ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and ‘The Corrections’ from Jonathan Franzen.
‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is a family chronicle by Nobel-prize winning Márquez set in the Latin American town Macondo. Covering a century the book describes all the victories and defeats of a single family and their friends and foes from the village they built themselves. It’s an impressive story covering many generations telling about their marriages, births, deaths, perils and adventures. Márquez probably wrote about all things one can encounter within their family.
In the end the story poses the question ‘what’s the use of everything?’ because, in the end, all will reduce to dust. A very beautiful way to end the epoch. Franzen chooses a less existential approach in his ‘The Corrections’, set in the contemporary USA it chronicles the story of an elderly couple who struggle to keep their family together. Their three kids have spread their wings long ago so now they have to put up with each others difficulties.
The main focus of the novel is the mother’s goal to reunite her entire offspring for Christmas. In trying to do so all the difficulties appear at the surface, the first son who’s really successful (on paper, at least) has trouble keeping it all together, the daughter makes some dubious choices and the last son doesn’t accomplish anything at all. Getting all of this together for Christmas seems like forcing a train towards a broken up section of rails at full speed. It has to derail.
Franzen seems pessimistic about the position of family in modern society. Work, wife, own life, everything seems more important. While children want to focus on their own lives parents are helplessly bored and needlessly worried and start calling their offspring on a daily basis. That’s what happens in ‘The Corrections’, all intentions are good, all results foul.
It’s an excellent piece of literature, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re encountering family problems or not, it works on so many levels. Modern society is dissected by Master Surgeon Franzen and the consequences of the philosophy of the mainstream are shown, shamelessly.
Are we headed in the wrong direction? Is family really the cornerstone of society and are we putting it in the wrong place? Márquez seems to say that society wouldn’t even be possible without sturdy families. Franzen agrees, depicting how individual lives derail when families do. Or is it the other way around? That’s a difficult thing to say, both probably influence each other heavily.
There is one very explicit problem that appears in both books, though. Does all the trouble we go through matter in the end, when everybody passes away, gets out of touch? This question is not entirely independent of the question if life matters, at all? I think it is fair to conclude that, if life matters, family matters. And conflicts will arise, but that’s not strange, for families seem to be an almost randomly chosen bunch of individuals. So try to navigate through the troubles as swiftly as possible, and try to enjoy beautiful gatherings such as Christmas as much as possible.
Happy holidays.
-JJM
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