Penguin Random House One Hundred Years Of Solitude (international Writers S.)

This is such a wonderful book. The range and breadth of situations, challenges, life problems, joy and most profound heartache that run through the story of one family over 100 years is captivating and fascinating. In that regard the story telling and imagination is incredible. Where I personally struggled with it, was in the fact that so many characters had the same name, at the same time. I know many families around the world do that, but reading quite complex family, romantic and political situations when so many people share the same name, just bewildered me and slowed the pace down. Plus, very often the story telling drifted into the fantastical and supernatural - perhaps that was a reflection of the intended time and age (deep religious and supernatural beliefs) but for me, the "magical" situations diluted the serious drama of the core story. So, I really enjoyed this epic tale, but it was not the most easy of reads.

García Márquez Nobel prize for literature winning novel is a good novel. It is set over 100 years; the Buendia family over 7 generations so as time lapses times change. It is an interesting book as it is a fantasy novel or magic realism or a surealistic life. It is also a comic book. The imagination is incredible. It is well written but I did find the names difficult to follow who was who. I will read other books by this author.

Some say, some books, you should never read again in later life. I’ve heard it said, for instance, that having enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye when one was seventeen, that it is a mistake to return to it in middle or later years. Thomas Mann prescribes the reading of his The Magic Mountain, “not once, but twice” – though omits to specify any interval. Having just finished reading ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I feel that this is a novel that one could beneficially revisit several times throughout one’s lifetime – say every two decades? And that’s quite a numerically reasonable suggestion because if - as at least two of the many characters in this narrative do – you live to the age of one hundred, that’s only five reads in a lifetime. For me however, there’s a snag. Somehow, when this novel was published and I was seventeen, I slipped through the net of readership, this is my first reading, and now at the age of seventy-three – according to my own perhaps rashly-prepared gospel – quite possibly it will be my only reading! A shame, because this is one of the richest, most dense, detailed, dreamlike, formalist, symbolic, mysterious, magical, funny - I had some good laughs, and some nightmares! – pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Painting equivalents? The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, Guernica, The Persistence of Memory might give one some idea of the level of detail – not necessarily content – one’s in for. There are twenty-four main protagonists agonising over seven generations of the BUENDIA family in this intense stylish saga which more or less coincides with the crackly political and social history of Colombia between the years 1820 and 1920. Unsurprisingly the plot is baffling. Its weave is not unlike that of a Wilton carpet, so instead of 'U' shaped yarns, the fibre is woven all the way through the carpet and then sheared to create a range of cut and loop textures. Every so often characters pop up to the surface, having travelled invisibly under the substrate for scores of pages, and years. Sometimes without any apparent explanation, build or lead in. The reader might be forgiven in thinking that s/he had one foot in a William Burroughs cut-and-paste text and the other in a David Bowie lyric. It might cause annoyance to a convergent thinker, but just relax and enjoy passages such as; ‘when he asked for the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen on this earth, all the women brought him their daughters. He became lost in misty byways, in figures reserved for oblivion, in the labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one’s thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages.’ But there’s much more than the apparently ‘cut-and-paste’ plot. Here are just some of the themes and symbols which go fuguing away throughout the narrative; gold, ice, buried treasure, death – particularly by firing squad, the death of birds flying into things, incest, the invisibility of people, cannibalism, and of course solitude. There are curious repeat mentions of anointings, lye, chamber pots, small candy animals, gypsies, macaws, small golden fishes, the drawing of chalk circles, begonias and the requirement – or not, a political reference – to paint one’s house either blue or red. So, I leave you with a few further almost edible Marquezian phrases; ‘more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his,’ or ‘solitude had made a selection in her memory, and had burned the nostalgic piles of dimming waste that life had accumulated in her heart,’ or how about, ‘the journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem’? But perhaps we should attribute at least some of this tickly prose to Gregory Rabassa his translator?

The start of the book is fantastic, and a real pleasure to read. In style, it is very similar to Love in the Time of Cholera in that the language used is extremely poetic. This, however, is about as far as it goes. Having read the book from cover to cover, I really couldn't tell you what it's about. The story is set in a place called Macondo. It is somewhat ambiguous as to what sort of settlement Macondo is. At the start of the novel, it comes across very much as a small village. Later on, it seems to be a provincial area and at times it seems to be a whole country. The story itself is non-linear which adds to the confusion. So a character that is killed very early on crops up again alive and healthy later on. The other thing that really annoyed me was the names. It's supposed to be set across several generations, only to keep the idea of a link between them, almost every male character is named Aureliano or Jose. When this is combined with the non-linear story line what you end up with is a book made up of pages and pages of beautiful word-imagery that is disparate and incoherent. There are individual sentences in here that are wonderful, but adjacent paragraphs often bear no relation to one another. The ending of the book (which I shan't spoil) does go a long way to explaining why this is. I felt, however, that it was a bit too convoluted. Because of the issue of the names, the reader can't really get to know any of the characters which is something I value a lot in a fiction book. So would I recommend it? Barely. It is a frustrating read, but there are some really beautiful phrases used where Marquez can, with just a few words, conjure up images in your head of stunning aesthetics.

The gentle acceptance of people in all their horror and beauty within a family is bitter sweet; coupled with the mystical brilliance of Mesquildes observations of the Buendia line and the growth of Macondo make for an enchanting and relatable story.

I don't have a lot to say except I felt like I was a member of the Buendia family myself by the time I finished reading this. Genuinely difficult to put down.

I would like to request everyone who purchased anything just give a review because including me everyone buy something after reading reviews. Let's talk about book so the book is, I would say interesting, confusing, but hard to understand at once, actually if one understand the Buendia family tree you get the store & also the rise and fall of Macondo.

A really captivating read. Take your time with this one and keep an open mind look for more than what you see.

I really enjoyed the book. Whether it is 100 years of Buenida family history spread over 500 pages, it flows very nicely. It's a page turner of a book, as you pass from one generation to another in a haze of names that keep repeating. Solitude is a metaphor, for melancholy, seclusion, mental illness, and many more similar feelings. Everybody goes through some dose of solitude through life, and it's nice to be able to reflect through Marquez's characters. What is interesting for me though is that most of the characters would be committed into instructions or jailed in our modern societies. However, with all their idiosyncrasies, obsessive-compulsiveness, and plain madness, they all managed to go through their existences long before the advent of mind-numbing medications. Life was sure simpler, and far more entertaining back in this era. I would recommend this book, to anybody who wants to expand their literary horizons, and their understanding of some dark corners of human nature. I can only hope that Marquez is spending the last days of his life at peace with his solitude...

Es un regalo para mi hija que ya tiene esta obra en español, cómo en una entrevista Gabriel García Márquez dijo que había quedado muy satisfecho con la versión en inglés, pues me parece excelente obsequio para una lectora bilingüe.