Years are passing by but time stands still – such is a perception of solitude… Such is a feeling created by One Hundred Years of Solitude novel…
A myth, legend, fable, allegory, chronicle, epopee, saga, fairytale – call it as you please but magical realism applied by Gabriel García Márquez to his narration encompasses all those.

Remedios the Beauty was proclaimed queen. Úrsula, who shuddered at the disquieting beauty of her great-granddaughter, could not prevent the choice. Until then she had succeeded in keeping her off the streets unless it was to go to mass with Amaranta, but she made her cover her face with a black shawl. The most impious men, those who would disguise themselves as priests to say sacrilegious masses in Catarino’s store, would go to church with an aim to see, if only for an instant, the face of Remedios the Beauty, whose legendary good looks were spoken of with alarming excitement throughout the swamp. It was a long time before they were able to do so, and it would have been better for them if they never had, because most of them never recovered their peaceful habits of sleep. The man who made it possible, a foreigner, lost his serenity forever, became involved in the sloughs of abjection and misery, and years later was cut to pieces by a train after he had fallen asleep on the tracks. From the moment he was seen in the church, wearing a green velvet suit and an embroidered vest, no one doubted that he came from far away, perhaps from some distant city outside of the country, attracted by the magical fascination of Remedios the Beauty. He was so handsome, so elegant and dignified, with such presence, that Pietro Crespi would have been a mere fop beside him, and many women whispered with spiteful smiles that he was the one who really should have worn the shawl. He did not speak to anyone in Macondo. He appeared at dawn on Sunday like a prince in a fairy tale, riding a horse with silver stirrups and a velvet blanket, and he left town after mass.

Tempus fugit…
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.” Ecclesiastes 1:4-6

I guarantee that 95% of you will hate this book, and at least 70% of you will hate it enough to not finish it, but I loved it. Guess I was just in the mood for it. Here's how it breaks down:

AMAZING THINGS: I can literally feel new wrinkles spreading across the surface of my brain when I read this guy. He's so wicked smart that there's no chance he's completely sane. His adjectives and descriptions are 100% PERFECT, and yet entirely nonsensical. After reading three chapters, it starts making sense... and that's when you realize you're probably crazy, too. And you are. We all are.

The magical realism style of the book is DELICIOUS. Sure, it's an epic tragedy following a long line of familial insanity, but that doesn't stop the people from eating dirt, coming back from the dead, spreading a plague of contagious insomnia, or enjoying a nice thunderstorm of yellow flowers. It's all presented in such a natural light that you think, "Of course. Of course he grows aquatic plants in his false teeth. Now why wouldn't he?"

This guy is the epitome of unique. Give me a single sentence, ANY SENTENCE the man has ever written, and I will recognize it. Nobody writes like him. (Also, his sentences average about 1,438 words each, so pretty much it's either him or Faulkner)

REASONS WHY MOST OF YOU WILL HATE THIS BOOK: I have to engage every ounce of my mental ability just to understand what the *@ is going on! Most people who read for relaxation and entertainment will want to send Marquez hate mail.

Also, there are approximately 20 main characters and about 4 names that they all share. I realize that's probably realistic in Hispanic cultures of the era, but SERIOUSLY, by the time you get to the sixth character named Aureliano, you'll have to draw yourself a diagram. Not even the classic Russians suffer from as much name-confusion as this guy.

On an uber-disturbing note, Marquez has once again (as he did in Love in the Time of Cholera) written a grown man having sex with a girl as young as 9... which is pretty much #1 on my list of "Things That Make You Go EWW!!!" He makes Lolita look like Polyanna on the virtue chart! (Note to authors: You give ONE of your characters a unique, but disgusting characteristic and it's good writing. Give it to more than one, and we start thinking we're reading your psychological profile, ya creep!)

If you feel like pushing your brain to its max, read it. The man did win the Nobel after all, it's amazing. But get ready to work harder to understand something than you ever have before in your life. And may God be with you.

FAVORITE QUOTES: (coincidentally also the shortest ones in the book)

She had the rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment.

He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.

Children inherit their parents' madness.

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows.

He was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

"What is your favourite book, mum?"

How many times have my children asked me that, growing up with a mother who spends most of her time reading - to them, alone, for work, for pleasure - or looking for new books in bookstores wherever we happen to be.

"I can't answer that, there are so many books I love, and in different ways!"

"Just name one that comes to mind!"

And I said, without really knowing why, and without thinking:

"One Hundred Years Of Solitude!"

"Why?"

"Because..."

This novel taught me that chaos and order are two sides of the same medal - called family life. It taught me that sadness and love go hand in hand, and that life is easy and complicated at the same time. It taught me that many wishes actually come true, but never in the way we expect, and most often with a catch. It taught me that sun and rain follow each other, even though we might have to wait for four years, eleven months and two days for rain to stop falling sometimes. It taught me that there are as many recipes for love as there are lovers in the world, and that human beings are lazy and energetic, good and bad, young and old, ugly and beautiful, honest and dishonest, happy and sad, all at the same time, - together and lonely.

It taught me that we are forever longing for what we do not have, until we get what we long for. Then we start longing for what we lost when our dreams came true.

This novel opened up the world of absurdities to me, and dragged me in like no other. In each member of the Buendía family, I recognise some relation, or myself, or both. Macondo is the world in miniature, and wherever I go, it follows me like a shadow. It is not rich, peaceful, or beautiful. It is just Macondo. No more, no less.

My favourite book? I don't know. There are so many. But I don't think any other could claim to be more loved than this one.

‘It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.’

Few memories of reading a book can match the sweetness of the warm spring day while at university when I sat in the grass down by a river and began Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterful One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel gripped me immediately and I followed the myth-like tales of the Buendía family and the fictional town of Macondo across multiple generations until the sunlight had vanished, the sound of the river adding an idyllic rhythm to my reading that made me keenly aware of the passage of time the idea of one thing flowing into the next. This novel truly is a tour de force earning its canonization not only as a crucial work of Latin American literature but as an internationally renowned novel of great beauty and insight. The amalgamation of stories all colliding within the novel form a complex web of critical analysis of history that functions as commentary on colonialism, political struggles of war and life under dictatorship, as well as interpersonal issues of family, legacy and love or the lack of it, making this a dense yet delightful novel that will forever reside within the hearts and minds of its readers.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was written in the span of just 18 months but will linger on in immortality as an important work of 20th century literature. It has sold over 50 million copies in over 25 languages (translated into english by the incredible Gregory Rabassa, the former WWII cryptologist was handpicked by Marquez for the task and reportedly said that Rabassa’s translation was better than his original in Spanish) and continues to charm readers everywhere. It is a cornerstone of modern Latin American Literature that has made Marquez a household name along with Jorge Luis Borges, from whom Marquez drew much inspiration (particularly from the story The Garden of Forking Paths which you can read here and inspired the cyclical ending of the novel).

Harold Bloom wrote of One Hundred Years of Solitude that ‘It is all story, where everything conceivable and inconceivable is happening at once.’ And indeed it does feel as if the whole of life is bursting forth from the book, which is a family epic that spans from the 1820’s through the 1920’s. Marquez combines his mythmaking with historical events, using magical realism as a political action of uncovering the meaning hiding in plain sight of historical reality. Carlos Fuentes writes in The Great Latin American Novel that Marquez’s storytelling serves ‘as an act of knowledge, as a negation of the false documents of the civil state which, until very recently papered over our reality.’ While Marquez says in a 1988 interview ‘there's not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality,’ it seems to affirm Fuente’s analysis and point to the reality in storytelling being a method to unlock a reality in life previously unobservable.

In this manner of magical realism, Marquez can move from tales of extraordinarily large men, women floating away into the sky, or absurdly long rain storms to actual historical events, such as the Banana Massacre when the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita) called in the army to massacre striking workers at the request of the US. Through this work and it’s investigations into US military intervention, dictatorships and revolutionaries, Marquez wrests the official narrative of history from the colonialist lenses that would prescribe a narrative to the Latin American countries they sought to exploit and gives history its own mythological life to function more freely. This also opens the novel up to multiple ways of reading it, where any of the numerous themes could be emphasized.

‘The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.’

As one would expect, solitude is a major theme working through the novel, with Buendía's own sense of solitude enlarged in the isolation of Macondo, which is falling apart by the end of the book. The weight of feeling ones country collapsing to external forces is strongly imposed as the novel careens towards conclusion, and as new technologies arrive and different societies begin to integrate, those of the old guard feel more and more isolated from the world. None of this moves in a straightforward manner, however, and the ending reveals history to be a cyclical process, one of constant creation and undoing. ‘...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle…’

One Hundred Years of Solitude is truly worth the read and holds a very special place in my heart. It is such a fascinating and fantastic blend of magical realism and historical insight that was a major work in world literature. One to read and read again.

5/5

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Buendía family tree (source)

...The prose can be confusing at the start
...Repetition of names makes it challenging to keep track of who is who.
...Yet, this is a reading experience like no other ...."mysterious & magical realism" ....comic novel yet exudes a strong undercurrent of sadness, sadness and tragic futility.
...The male characters are passionate sexuality and filled with ambition --
...Most of the female characters have common sense, determination, and passionate eroticism
...Both sexes can't seem to relate to the outside world of the town they are in ...
...The novel does cover 100 years.
...This is a huge Latin American Historical novel -multi-layered epic of the Buendia family. Its rooted in reality -the development of Colombia since its independent from Spain in the 19th century. Its not only a story about this family itself but of evolution of society from 'nothing' to social and family groups --as the town itself is as much the protagonist as the family is. We see the development of religion from fairy tales and magic moving forward into today's more modern world.
...There is ongoing intermingling of the fantastic and the ordinary throughout the story. Its fascinating to observe the magic evolve with the family and the village of Macondo --which they founded after leaving their home in the mountains --searching for the ocean. They failed to find the ocean--but they built their town on the edge of the great swamp.
...The town changes and is transformed by new inventions. "A heavy Man" sold Jose Arcadio Buendia a magnet -then later a telescope. --It was the gypsies who first brought these 'inventions'.
...Obsessions, solitude, love, and war are themes throughout ...
Characters have different ways for masking their pain:
...One girl eats dirt,
...Some characters lock 'themselves' away physically,
...One man loses his mind and is tied to a chestnut tree
...Another man spends years writing on parchments -another man spends years trying to decipher them
.... You really read about 'flying carpets' --

...In 'some' ways this book reminds me of "Midnights Children" by Salmon Rushie. In both books the prose is lyrical that create deep visual imagery --magic -and fantasy.

...The ending of the story --seems to be about 'learning, then moving on'. ....

....A dazzling masterpiece!

La idea de este libro es fascinante. Especialmente porque Gabo describe a Macondo de una forma fenomenal, hace que el lector se lo imagine, incluso yo mismo viviendo ahí con todas las aventuras que el libro cuenta.
Por otro lado, y para mí lo más importante, es que hay demasiados personajes. Primero hablan de la familia Buendía, después se amplía, amplía, amplía y amplía. Luego aparecen otros personajes que vienen del extranjero o son del mismo Macondo. Ya como en la mitad del libro, la lectura se hace muy pesada, tratando de enlazar personajes, de recordarlos, de saber quién murió, de saber quién estaba con quién, el parentesco de este con este otro.
La verdad es que me demoré casi 2 meses en leer el libro completo, y eso no tiene nada de malo, pero lo que me hostigó un poco, es que tenías que leer más de 2 o 3 veces una misma parte para seguir enlazando la historia. A veces me concentraba más en seguir el hilo del libro que disfrutarlo, y eso, en mi opinión no es bueno.
En lo personal, creo que es un excelente libro, pero pudo haber sido contado de una forma un poco más simple, y sobre todo, no con tantos personajes, que al final terminan cansando (por lo menos a mí).
En mi opinión como lector totalmente amateur y subjetivo este libro es un poco sobre-valorado, ya que se habla de un clásico universal, que no te puedes morir sin leerlo, etc. Pero la verdad es que me esperaba una historia igual de buena, pero más simple y amigable de digerir.

Jose Arcadio Buendia decides one day in his small rather impoverished town, set in South America (Colombia, in the early 1800's ) that he wants to leave, say goodbye forever to the relatives, a killing makes him feel uncomfortable there, taking his pregnant wife Ursula his first cousin, and explore the mysterious lands beyond the unknown horizon with his followers and friends over the treacherous mountains through the dense , noisy jungles full of wild animals and sickness...months pass, they have not yet seen the sea their ultimate goal. Lost with little food left surrounded by a vast
non- accessible repugnant swamp, the tired leader finds a suitable place by a calm river, after dreaming about a city of mirrors. Buendia builds a little village in this hot tropical region, he believes is encircled by water , of only twenty adobe homes, though all are happy to stop and rest. So remote that no one knows they exist, no map shows Macondo, the strange name Jose calls it. This will be a better life for all an utopian place , his people will prosper the first born will appropriately be a Buendia, the son of Jose and Ursula named after the founder of the town Jose Arcadio himself, soon another son Aureliano and daughter Amaranta seven generations will live here, the last six to be their birthplace . Macondo slowly grows, ragged gypsies somehow discover this most isolated town led by the quite bright Melquiades, bringing modern inventions from the outside world and some that never were of this Earth...flying carpets right out of an Arabian Nights fable, more magic turning things into different shapes and objects, in their annual welcomed visit , the local children become unfazed by such weird events. Still the gypsy Melquiades is not or does not seem quite human, more of a ghost from who knows where? Time passes and the unconventional Buendia family thrives (they have a propensity to fall in love, with their own kin) , nevertheless trouble breaks out between the Conservative and Liberal Parties in the nation. Resulting in many years of savage civil wars, the endless conflicts destroy the land eventually the army is headed by Col. Aureliano Buendia on the liberal side, son of the unstable Jose, a ruthless soldier who kills his conservative enemies as well as liberals who get in his way, yet will not name himself a general. The numerous Buendia family continues to get richer, Ursula is the rock so Macondo flourishes, many villagers live over a hundred years, trains come , electricity, phonograph records, radio, movies even baffling automobiles are spotted. The banana plantations too established nearby with their bloody workers strikes , the foreign owners arrive importing odd fashions and customs. The old decrepit Buendia house the largest in town becomes haunted by dead relatives . Still children are always being born (including Remedios Buendia, the most beautiful woman on Earth, she causes four men to die unable to get her love) most are " illegitimate" though, the kids not knowing who their real parents are. And slowly the outside begins to discover this town for better or worse, but will it last? A tremendous novel , one of a kind book that maybe doesn't show reality, however does tell us people are complicated and unpredictable.

A fantastic story where reality meets fiction in seven generations of the Buendias family set in the Americas during a time of discovery and Spanish colonisation, the fight between liberalism and conservatism and the era of industrialisation. These amongst other dominant themes of love, survival, death, and solitude make for an epic novel.

The fictional story begins in Macondo, a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water, a utopia that knows little of death and hardship. The fate of Macondo feels both doomed and predetermined from the outset as a small society tries to survive the external influences of a wider America. Through 100 years Mocondo changes and so does the members of the Buendias family with two great characters as head of the family Jose Arcadio and Ursula - well the matriarch. The custodian of the family's honour, for over 100 years, through civil war, political turbulence, and industrialisation. Eventually Macondo becomes exposed to the outside world and the government of newly independent Colombia.

Marquez tells this complex story of a multi generation family, who leave and return, love and despise, rise and fall, and whose characters evolve and grow throughout the book as the author unspools a knotty texture of 100 years of family. The plot development is superb but too many to summarise as the book weaves sub plots and themes continuously through this marathon of a story. The book also brings the real and surreal, with a hint of magic as Marquez draws the reader into the ordinary and extraordinary events and peoples lives in a way that keeps you captivated and immersed to the end.

So, what’s not to love about “One Hundred Years of Solitude” - The book sometimes feels long, and not an easy read which is made even more challenging because all the characters seem to go by the same few names. I sat with the family tree, abbreviated the names or provided alternatives to keep on top of seven generations. The ending of the book should be at the front and events don't happen in sequence.

Apart from that, I loved Marquez's literary classic and would highly recommend. It may have polarised opinion for a variety of reasons but for me, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a superb piece of literature and worthy to find itself in the 20th Century classic Hall of Fame and in the list of books everyone should read in their lifetime.

Some of my favourite quotes from the book

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude.”

“Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”

“There is always something left to love.”

What do you get when you combine a Colombian author (Gabo) with Magical realism, and an “Über” translator (Gregory Rabassa)? Nothing more than One Hundred years of Solitude!

Writing yet another lengthy review for this masterpiece would be superfluous. Literary Critics and GR reviewers said it all: “a cosmopolitan story, one that “could correct the path of the modern novel; unlike the succinct language of social realism, the prose of García Márquez was an “atmospheric purifier,” full of poetic and flamboyant language; contrary to the formal experiments of the nouveau roman, his novel returned to the narrative of imagination; the novel grew to have a texture of its own” (The Atlantic).

A novel of ephemeral truths, of time that cannot be recovered. Memories suspended in time - the crushing weight of so much past that coexists in one instance.

Perhaps the secret of good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude….

https://i.imgur.com/8B92Ts8.png

This book went from 5, to 4, to 3 stars. It went from brilliant & zany, to unique & amusing, to overworked & predictable. Magical realism--the sine qua non of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the archetype, the empyreal novel that pioneered the outburst of this type of South American writing. I would not re-read this novel, but I would recommend it to all who savor the radial expanse of genre in literature. To be considered a comprehensive reader at life's end, you will had to have read magical realism, and One Hundred Years of Solitude won the Nobel Prize.

Ofttimes you experience works of art just to be exposed to something culture holds worthy, no matter the medium; music; painting; literature; dance; theater; technology. ***BEGIN SOAPBOX***So you don't like Western movies; you still need to watch Unforgiven, the Best Movie of the Year 1992. So you don't like broad brush strokes; you still need to see in person a flower painted by Van Gogh. So you don't like 20th century plays; you still need to see enacted the vicious realism of Eugene O'Neal's A Long Day's Journey Into Night. So you don't like Rock-n-Roll; you still need to listen to the perfect album by Guns and Roses, Appetite For Destruction. You don't like warfare; you still need to take a tour of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, considered the most complicated man made structure ever. So you don't like jazz; you still......get the point.***END SOAPBOX***

One Hundred Years of Solitude needs to be experienced, then put back on the library rack. You've just been exposed to something the literary world holds worthy. It may not have been exactly my taste (like Garcia Marquez's 5 star Love in the Time of Cholera), but it was worthwhile in all its strangeness.

Strangeness. How to define what I consider a strange novel? Let me try a visual representation or a visual transcription of how I would draw this novel. Why you ask? Well, why the hell not.

Contour drawing--also known as continuous-line drawing, is an artistic technique used in the field of art in which the artist sketches the contour of a subject by drawing continuous lines that result in a drawing that is contorted and/or abstracted (wikipedia). 'Contorted and abstracted.' That's the key. Contour drawing is a type of art that uses one single line without lifting the pen from the paper, thereby creating a visual effect that is sometimes representative, sometimes complex, and sometimes contorted and/or abstracted. Blind contour drawing, a subset, is done without ever looking at the paper until the subject is complete, and is usually even more contorted and/or abstracted.

To me, Marquez was creating a literary version of contour drawing. One Hundred Years of Solitude has the rudimentary look and feel of a novel. It's got all the right components, an epic story that follows 100 years of the Buendia family in the remote town of Macondo, Columbia. I believe Marquez sat at his typewriter, wrote the first sentence, took about 400 coffee breaks, but didn't stop until 417 pages later with the last sentence. The story is a single line never lifted from the paper.

I don't think magical realism needs to be edited. It's a non-stop, brute-force narrative that keeps pushing forward, relentlessly, interminably, without a slack in pace. But this is not to say that the story is perfectly chronological. It isn't. Instead, like contour drawing, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is pages full of overlapping spirals and squiggles that keep moving slightly to the right, so that there's intersecting lines in a rhythmic doodle, always moving forward but causing us to cross through previous story over and over again, repeatedly, but never edited; a single line. You move forward in time, then move back in time, forward and back in circles. It's a brilliant & zany technique that captures the same kind of storyline fable your grandmother may have told you when you were 7. Anything's possible in magical realism, but if you slow down and question the finer points, then you lose the bigger picture. Consequently, the story has a breathless quality. It's almost as if grandma slows down and thinks about the subject she's covered, then she will have lifted the pencil from the paper, and she will have lost her way, unable to recover any sense of the story; the magic will have dissipated.

So, the story was pretty decent. But, after a couple hundred pages, the breathless, right-handed, overlapping spirals of storyline became overworked, as if every time grandma took a sip from her white wine, pushing way past bedtime, you could tell exactly how the story was about to continue. Not what the story was going to be, or what words were going to come from her mouth, but you could tell closely how she was going to say it.

I recommend you read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the largest installments you can. If you read it over several weeks, or only a few pages at a time, you will absolutely--I guarantee--lose the gist. You'll find yourself going back and trying to figure out which of the 3 Jose Arcadios or 6 Aurelianos the story is discussing, and in which spiral. I had a permanent bookmark on page 0 that outlined the family genealogy.

New words: organdy, joie de vivre, Babrant, proboscidian

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

This long phrase is so full of life and humor that although I mentioned Márquez yesterday, I couldn't help but mention it again. First off, to start off the novel with a firing squad on the subject of the sentence, time is thrown into a loop which winds and weaves its way through generations of Buendías throughout the novel. The magic of discovering ice is also one of the fine touches that Márquez is so known for: taking the ordinary and turning into something spectacular. The fact that the character and his father are both mentioned here foreshadows the complex and rambling family tree that the reader will get intimately familiar with (and confused by) throughout the book. I read this one in high school (kind of a jab at the anti-Columbian attitude of Cuban Miami by my forward thinking AP English teacher - the best professor or teacher that I ever had) and have probably re-read it about eight or nine times, each being more enjoyable than the last.

I have since read all of Mario Vargas Llosa's work who is probably the most comparable South American writer of the same period and have to say that I was seduced by his writing quite a bit. One Hundred Years still stands out as a monumental piece of literature, and if you enjoy it, I would suggest trying The War at the End of the World by MVL as well.

تفاجئت انها عجبتني للدرجة دي، توقعاتي إنها مش هتعجبني خفضت توقعاتي فـ خلتني أستمتع بيها

بعد تفكير لمدة كام ساعة، لا هي الرواية عظيمة يا جماعة. وآخر فصلين لوحدهم كفيلين يخلوا أي شيء عظيم.

ريفيو مصور:

https://youtu.be/ZLNbEQn_yGs