My impression when I read it was that I was witnessing humanity first emerging from primordial mud, from the creamy swamps of stone age, as if the foundation of the city of Macondo was the first settlement of civilization and its inhabitants were all Adams and Eves, all of them still humid with the sweat of the dew of paradise. It's like the children of Eden modelling and pilling up the first bricks of Ur or Uruk, of Nineveh or Babylon (all the houses of red mud and of bamboo/taquara).

Humanity was at the same time more innocent and stronger, more ignorant and hungrier. The friendship and the butchery, the marriage and drinking rituals, the sexual hunger and the love caresses, the trades and crafts and arts and festivals: all of it seemed, in my eyes, as discovered for the first time by the inhabitants of the world of this book. When they made love, they did it with more power and pleasure than our current race; when they killed, they did it with more foaming savagery. Their veins still had primeval magma snaking and tingling inside them; their arteries still burned with an effervescence contaminated with the sweat of minotaur’s and the menstrual blood of sirens. It is a book that portrays a period in history but with the taste of something that came before history, before civilization, before the written word, before the invention of time. The first settlers, with the first house-foundations, will be the ones who will finally make time open its eyes and start growing conscious – as if, the soil being perforated to seat the first beams, time started to gush off, like newfound petroleum.

It begins with creation. Even the fauna and flora, with plants with tick and oozing blood of milk, flowers with golden pollen, butterflies and mosquitos emerging like dense fog, and the birds singing on the branches, the tamarins jumping from tree to tree, the fat salamanders crawling in the viscous vegetation, the macaws whose flesh is blue and taste like musk: this environment seemed as the original jungles of Eden before the fall of humanity. It begins with creation, but it will march on inexorably until the crack of doom.

And then you get the same errors and weaknesses happening again and again and again, by generation after generation of characters, as if didn’t matter how much civilization changed, for the original and primeval world (where things still didn’t have a name, where men and women needed to point to indicate what they were referring to) could never be completely silenced. No matter how much technology and “progress” fertilized the world, still the original marrow of our bestial beings could never be suppressed: it kept screaming inside the bones and veins of the men and women of the book. Like the sweet and nauseating pulp of guava, there is no way to wash the taste, the nausea and the sweetness from this the people who are still and forever tattooed by the Dionysian stamp of the state-of-nature.

So this:

a) The sperm of Adam could never be dissolved from our species; the perfume of the forbidden fruit never gagged, for it is forever entangled in our flesh: that seems to me one of the great themes of the book.

b) Somehow I feel that the author desired to portray the whole history of humanity – from the first shadows that crawled from the marshes of Eden (the slimy early-fishes creeping from sea to land), to the last cries of the last infants and the last whispers of the last ancients (whose backs carry the weight of all the thousands that lived before them) – occurring in one single town, during the course of mere one hundred years.

It’s a great book.