I'm not going to write a full review of this book because where would I even start?! Also so many other people have written about this book before me, and I truly have no way to coherently explain my feelings about this book. It's a bizarre, magical story that feels cyclical and fresh all at the same time.

I won't lie and say it's easy to read, but at the same time, if you don't try and understand everything that is happening and you just take it chapter by chapter, you can absolutely make it through. Don't be alarmed by the repetition of character names in this story; at first it's intimidating but eventually you get a sense of who is who and how they refer to them by nicknames or other details. And since it is magical realism, you don't really need to understand what is really happening and what is not. It's much more about the experience of reading this novel than deciphering every element. There's just too much information on every single page for one reader to retain and understand it all, especially on just the first time reading it.

Is it a new all-time favorite? No. Am I glad I've finally read it? Absolutely! It was a definite bucket list book and I was worried I'd put it off forever, until years from now when it still sat on my shelf, taunting me to pick it up. I'm not sure if or when I'd ever revisit it, but I'm happy to have checked it off my list of books to read before I die. I'd encourage others to do the same if they are interested!

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a tremendous piece of literature. It's not an easy read. You're not going to turn its pages like you would the latest John Grisham novel, or The DaVinci Code. You have to read each page, soaking up every word, immersing yourself in the imagery. Mr. Marquez says that he tells the story as his grandmother used to tell stories to him: with a brick face. That's useful to remember while reading, because that is certainly the tone the book takes. If you can get through the first 50 pages, you will enjoy it. But those 50 are a doozy. It's hard to keep track of the characters, at times (mainly because they are all named Jose Arcadio or Aureliano), but a family tree at the beginning of my edition was helpful. The book follows the Buendia family, from the founding of fictional Macondo to a fitting and fulfilling conclusion. The family goes through wars, marriages, many births and deaths, as well as several technological advances and invasions by gypsies and banana companies (trust me, the banana company is important). You begin to realize, as matriarch Ursula does, that as time passes, time does not really pass for this family, but turns in a circle. And as the circle closes on Macondo and the Buendias, you realize that Mr. Marquez has taken you on a remarkable journey in his literature. Recommended, but be prepared for a hard read.

Finally I am trying to write a review for this book after completing it a month ago and still don’t have many words to describe this book, I mean the words that can do justice to the beauty of this book.

Basically this is the story of start to end of Buendia family. Buendia family has a tradition to repeat name in the family even if they think it was a bad omen yet they follow the tradition and keep this ritual alive. And that’s why it is hard for me to recount what happens in the book in terms of story. Even if I end up mixing the names, I still remember the characters by way of their actions. And it is there, for me, lies the beauty of this tale. These characters were so same and yet so different from each other.

Marquez has blended old and new so nicely that it was hard for me to point out where one starts and the other ends. His characters embraced new things with open arms but also stayed true to their roots and kept old traditions alive till the very end. I simply can’t stop myself but marvel upon the ability of Marquez at how he kept so many threads alive at the same time. It is so difficult to do, not to mention with the same set of names. It never felt out of place. No matter how far you go, he would bring you back to the core, the Buendia family.

This book is like abstract art where you find it hard to get the meaning (don’t know about others but I am one of them) but once you get it, it just hard not to admire and cherish it.

قرأت هذا الكتاب بالطبعة الصادرة عن دار المدى، ترجمة وتحقيق صالح علماني، وهي ترجمة رائعة بدورها.

لمزيد من التفاصيل الكتاب متوفر في مكتبة النيل والفرات

http://www.neelwafurat.com/itempage.a...

وباختصار، مئة عام من العزلة ثروة أدبية تضاف لرصيد العالم.

مع الشكر.

Raz po spożyciu pewnej substancji przez 40 minut gapiłem się na mrowisko, a potem przez kolejne 15 na kolegę, który usiadł obok mnie i też zaczął się gapić na mrowisko.

Gdybym spożył tego z sześć razy więcej, to musiałbym wejść na poziom fazy, jaką miał Marquez, pisząc tę powieść. Niepowtarzalna rzecz.

A tu recenzja na YT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3utX9...

WARNINGS WARNINGS
I don't recommend this book if you feel uncomfortable with books that depict graphically

* Pedophilia/rape  A 9 year old girl forced to marry and later bear a child to a grown man

* Incest/child abuse  The Buendia family members are constantly falling in love with close cousins, half brothers, nephews. An older woman Amarantha makes out with her underage nephew
* Non sensical Violence  including the cruel death of a newborn, and that's the ending scene. This book leaves you feeling disturbed
*Prostitution
* Cheating
* Bestiality
* Women treated as objects sometimes by their own parents





If you like me grew up reading marvelous books like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Twilight, The Hunger games, which are all extremely strong in terms of characterization and character development and which are at times trashed by the same critics that praised this piece of cr%p, I doubt you'll enjoy this book because:

* No plot, everything is a messy mix of twisted, and I mean TWISTED, disturbing, cringe-inducing family anecdotes
*No character development.
* Poor character presentation. Other than I know that Amarantha is somehow fierce it's difficult to describe the rest of the characters personalities. What are their goals? What do they want? What do they fear? Who are they? What are their motivations?
* Poor worldbuilding. Am I supposed to know how Macondo, the setting of this book looks like? All I know is that Macondo founders were trying to reach the sea and they couldn't and were tired of travelling so I know there's no sea close to this town. The rules of this world don't seem to follow a logic, either. It's like Garcia Marques just smoke weed and added whatever he saw when he was under the effects of the weed to add magical elements here and there. I rarely notice worldbuilding issues in my reads because I have a strong imagination. Even books that don't describe the rules of their worlds or the setting properly don't turn me off, but since this book is universally praised as a "master piece" I was expecting more.
* No coherent timeline, Little to No dialogue
* Author breaking the rule of show don't tell 98% of the book




I should have tried to convince my professor to change this assigment. I should've told him that this kind of topics are potential PTSD triggers for me (which is 100% true, although usually books don't activate triggers for me, certain kind of music and smells are triggering for me) or that they are against my religious beliefs (that'd been a lie, but I wish I had lied) Maybe it wouldn't have worked and still I'd been stuck to read this horrible book, but these professors should be more responsible when assigining this kind of disturbing readings and forcing people to read them taking away our sacred right of DNF a book we don't enjoy .

I'm aware that the author won a Nobel Prize, but it seems to me that it was more like the academy thought it'd be rebellious and edgy to give an award to this author leaving other more talented authors out, therefore steering controversy. Sort of like they did when they gaveBob Dylan the Nobel Prize even if he's a songwriter and poet more than a book writer.

I don't even know who is supposed to enjoy this book. I think that some Hispanic readers might find something good in this book because it seems to me that the author at times was talking about Colombian/Hispanic political issues in a metaphoric way, but honestly there wasn't enough of that.

Also, the opening line of this book is supposedly matter of study in English literature courses around the world


'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.'


I can see why some readers might find that intriguing and get hooked from there, but I read a lot of books with great opening lines/paragraphs in commercial literature. Angefall by Susan EE, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Maze Runner by James Dashner have strong opening lines that get you hooked. I think every reader gets hooked by different opening lines, so why critics and scholars think this opening line is better than any is beyond me. However, I'll say that the ending scene was strong and extremely disturbing. It's a scene that will make you feel haunted and in search of a happy reading because  A newborn is eaten by ants. You're supposed to imagine the ants carrying only the carcass of what was moments before a lovely baby ... who was born with a pigtail O_O

I'm only writing this because I need to organize my ideas for my essay. I doubt that writing my honest opinion about this trash will earn me a good mark, so I'm trying to find an angle to write about. Maybe I can write about the role of women in Garcia's books. The other Garcia's book I read was Chronicle of a foretold death which was thankfully short and somehow realistic, but still 100% misogynist. An oudated view of women is common in this author's writings.
My recommendations if you are forced to read this author:

* Write notes for each time a new Buendia appears. There are at least a dozen characters sharing almost the exact name and that is confusing
* Don't expect character development, don't expect world building
* Don't expect brilliant dialogue, although you can expect beautiful monologues
* Expect a lot of info-dumping and exposition
* Expect a lot of magical elements, but not the kind of magic that makes you want to live in this world.
* Expect a lot of misogynism It's like the author comes from ancient times or the Taliban and his views on women are very outdated. As a demi-feminist some scenes were hard to stomach.
* Keep an enjoyable read at hand because sometimes you're tired of this world and you want to get out of it by reading something good.

Long story short, this book is way Overrated. Overrated doesn't cover it. I think the author, may he rest in peace, might have written it under the effects of the weed.




Best reviews I found on GR:
Martine's

Adam's

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

Someone asked me about the most beautiful book i have ever read. I thought for a long time. Was it Lord of the Rings? Pride and Prejudice? Wuthering Heights?

But then I remembered this aforementioned quote. And I was surprised that it took me so long to answer the question. Because this book is most easily the most beautiful book i have ever read.

When I was 15 years old i bought this book and started reading it.
Still after one week i had only completed the first chapter.
Still i didn't give up hope.
Every six months i read it again, read the first chapter, forgot the name of every character, then started reading it again.

This went on for two years. Until the previous month while I was cleaning my bookshelves I came across this book again. And I started reading it. And this time i finally understood it. This time I saw the brilliance of Gabriel García Márquez.

The brilliance of Márquez trickles like water throughout the whole book returning again and again to illuminate the Buendías and human nature. The concepts are time, fate, humor and magic. It is in these concepts that the great playfulness and great power of the novel live. This novel does not explain reality as as experienced by one observer but rather the reality experienced by different people from different backgrounds.

The story of the Buendia family does flow in a forward narration right from the time of Jose Arcadio Buendia up until the last story of Aureliano Babilonia, but every now and then it flits across time, not just as a flashback but even fast forward. Even before you are acquainted with the characters, Marquez gives you a hint of their future, in some cases even their death, such as in the case of the firing squad that Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to face, Rebeca’s life-long isolation, Ursula’s survival for all seven generations and Amaranta’s spinsterhood.

Every single thing symbolizes something. The Gypsies, the Little Gold Fishes, the Railroad, the Golden Chamber Pot and you are left asking yourself about how, just how could a man explain all of this in mere 417 pages.

There are so many themes that i feel like i could write books upon books on the sheer brilliance of this book. This book has taught me so many things. . .It taught me about sadness, longing, obsession, loneliness, war and so many things.

Take a single sentence from this book and read it. I promise you this, you will never read anything like it. The man has used adjectives, described the places, the characters, the feelings, everything in such a way that this book becomes the definition of "Perfect".

I know most people consider it an incoherent mess of thoughts and i can see where that might come from but for me this book is the epitome of unique. This book requires all your brainpower because every sentence is loaded with information.You expect a novel to have a generous sprinkling of dialogues between people but this novel looks more like an academic reading.

But believe me when i say this it is all worth it.

n  Favorite Quotesn
The whole book actually.

n  n    “There is always something left to love.”n  n

n  n    “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.”n  n

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

n  n    “Cease, cows, life is short.”n  n

n  n    “Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”n  n

n  n    “Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.”n  n

n  n    “He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”
n  n

n  n    “She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment”n  n

n  n    “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”n  n

n  Artworkn
I stole found this artwork here.





You ask what else is so special about this?

Well i have read books. Rated them 5 stars. Fawned over them. But still sometimes at night, in the quiet, while listening to the grasshoppers play their song, my mind goes back to Macondo. To the day i first entered that village and whether I liked it or not, chose it or not, my fate had been written, just like the Buendias, that they were to be born and die in solitude- and not just the Buendia family but even the village of Macondo.



P.S: I know what you are thinking.
P.P.S: Yes I can write sensible reviews.

So I know that I'm supposed to like this book because it is a classic and by the same author who wrote Love in the Time of Cholera. Unfortunately, I just think it is unbelievably boring with a jagged plot that seems interminable. Sure, the language is interesting and the first line is the stuff of University English courses. Sometimes I think books get tagged with the "classic" label because some academics read them and didn't understand and so they hailed these books as genius. These same academics then make a sport of looking down their noses at readers who don't like these books for the very same reasons. (If this all sounds too specific, yes I had this conversation with a professor of mine).

I know that other people love this book and more power to them, I've tried to read it all the way through three different times and never made it past 250 pages before I get so bored keeping up with all the births, deaths, magical events and mythical legends. I'll put it this way, I don't like this book for the same reason that I never took up smoking. If I have to force myself to like it, what's the point. When I start coughing and hacking on the first cigarette, that is my body telling me this isn't good for me and I should quit right there. When I start nodding off on the second page of One Hundred Years of Solitude that is my mind trying to tell me I should find a better way to pass my time.

Revised 28 March 2012

Huh? Oh. Oh, man. Wow.

I just had the weirdest dream.

There was this little town, right? And everybody had, like, the same two names. And there was this guy who lived under a tree and a lady who ate dirt and some other guy who just made little gold fishes all the time. And sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn’t, and… and there were fire ants everywhere, and some girl got carried off into the sky by her laundry…

Wow. That was messed up.

I need some coffee.

The was roughly how I felt after reading this book. This is really the only time I’ve ever read a book and thought, “You know, this book would be awesome if I were stoned.” And I don’t even know if being stoned works on books that way.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which is such a fun name to say) is one of those Writers You Should Read. You know the type – they’re the ones that everyone claims to have read, but no one really has. The ones you put in your online dating profile so that people will think you’re smarter than you really are. You get some kind of intellectual bonus points or something, the kind of highbrow cachet that you just don’t get from reading someone like Stephen King or Clive Barker.

Marquez was one of the first writers to use “magical realism,” a style of fantasy wherein the fantastic and the unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences. While I’m sure it contributed to the modern genre of urban fantasy – which also mixes the fantastic with the real – magical realism doesn’t really go out of its way to point out the weirdness and the bizarrity. These things just happen. A girl floats off into the sky, a man lives far longer than he should, and these things are mentioned in passing as though they were perfectly normal.

In this case, Colonel Aureliano Buendia has seventeen illegitimate sons, all named Aureliano, by seventeen different women, and they all come to his house on the same day. Remedios the Beauty is a girl so beautiful that men just waste away in front of her, but she doesn’t even notice. The twins Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo may have, in fact, switched identities when they were children, but no one knows for sure – not even them. In the small town of Macondo, weird things happen all the time, and nobody really notices. Or if they do notice that, for example, the town’s patriarch has been living for the last twenty years tied to a chestnut tree, nobody thinks anything is at all unusual about it.

This, of course, is a great example of Dream Logic – the weird seems normal to a dreamer, and you have no reason to question anything that’s happening around you. Or if you do notice that something is wrong, but no one else seems to be worried about it, then you try to pretend like coming to work dressed only in a pair of spangly stripper briefs and a cowboy hat is perfectly normal.

Another element of dreaminess that pervades this book is that there’s really no story here, at least not in the way that we have come to expect. Reading this book is kind of like a really weird game of The Sims - it’s about a family that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and something happens to everybody. So, the narrator moves around from one character to another, giving them their moment for a little while, and then it moves on to someone else, very smoothly and without much fanfare. There’s very little dialogue, so the story can shift very easily, and it often does.

Each character has their story to tell, but you’re not allowed to linger for very long on any one of them before Garcia shows you what’s happening to someone else. The result is one long, continuous narrative about this large and ultimately doomed family, wherein the Buendia family itself is the main character, and the actual family members are secondary to that.

It was certainly an interesting reading experience, but it took a while to get through. I actually kept falling asleep as I read it, which is unusual for me. But perhaps that’s what Garcia would have wanted to happen. By reading his book, I slipped off into that non-world of dreams and illusions, where the fantastic is commonplace and ice is something your father takes you to discover.

------
“[Arcadio] imposed obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a Liberal victory. In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a scarecrow. At first no one took him seriously.”

Can you appreciate a book and dislike it at the same time? This book reminded me of Lincoln at the Bardo, although certainly not in content. Both are written by obviously brilliant writers. Both are inventive, creative. Both stretch the conventional boundaries of the novel (something only great writers try, and something I appreciate in any art form). Both are amazing, and yet, I didn't love either book. Sometimes originality works and sometimes it doesn't, at least for some.

I understood what Marquez was saying: war is senseless, events, like names, repeat throughout history, families are complicated, political parties are all guilty of the same things, the past often blends with the present, progress often has unwanted results, capitalism can be corrupt and on and on. These are all important aspects in the history of Colombia during the 100 year period 1820-1920. I also think the author intentionally wanted the characters to be blurry, for after all, weren't they the same characters through the generations? Only the matriarch was a player with depth. I need to feel something for characters, not necessarily compassion or love, just something.

100 Years of Solitude might have been palatable if I had known the history of Colombia during that time period. But even so, it was repetitious, yawn producing. I often groaned as I picked it back up. It was like being in a fevered dream, bizarre events with moments of clarity.

Am I glad I read it? Yes. Did I enjoy parts, especially the humorous parts? Yes. I'm actually fonder of it the farther I get away from the drudgery of reading it. Did I enjoy the experience? No. I am just thankful Marquez didn't write 200 Years of Solitude!

به نام او

مطمئنا اکثر دوستان این کتاب رو خوانده اند. من هم چهار سال پیش با ترجمه آقای کیومرث پارسای خونده بودم و به زحمت به آخر رسوندمش ولی امسال با ترجمه جدید جناب آقای کاوه میرعباسی کتاب رو خوندم و باید عرض کنم که فوق العاده بود خیلی چسبید. یعنی ترجمه بد و خوب اینقدر فرق داره. البته معروفترین ترجمه، ترجمه مرحوم فرزانه است که انتشارات امیرکبیر منتشر کرده که الحق ترجمه خوبی هم هست ولی من با توجه به مقایسه بیست صفحه از دو کتاب این رو ترجیح دادم، ضمنا گویا چاپ جدید امیرکبیر دچار سانسورهای وحشتناکی شده. جالبه این ترجمه ای که من خوندم چیز دیگه ای نمونده بود که ترجمه نکرده باشه
و اما جهت دیگر معرفی کتاب، چاپ فوق العاده خوب نشر کتابسرای نیکه، هم طراحی جلد و صفحه آرایی عالیه هم برگ کتاب بسیار مرغوبه هم فونت تمیز و چشم نوازه، خلاصه خیلی خوبه و فقط مشکل بزرگش قیمت بالاشه که البته در بازار امروز کتاب قیمت نامعقولی نیست.
در آخر قسمتی از کتاب رو میآورم :
"تصمیم گرفتند دیگر به سینما نروند چون به نظرشان رسید خودشان آنقدر غم و غصه دارند که لازم نباشد برای بدبختیهای تصنعی مخلوقاتی خیالی گریه کنند"

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