Excellent translation of Marquez's masterpiece

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	• One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) Gabriel Garcia Marquez Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 48 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In its own class....

I just finished reading "100 Years of Solitude". I really enjoyed it, tho it took me 3 weeks to read it. Everytime I opened it back up to continue where I was I felt like I was stepping back into Macondo. There's no place like it nor is there a family like the Buendia's either. The story and the words used by Marquez are so deep in meaning and a sentence can mean so many things. I loved it and I love the twists and turns the family goes thru like any family. However, I knew what was going to happen in the end, which was really kinda ironic and funny. You have to read to find out.

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A Work You Come Back To, Ever and Always

What is it about a certain work of fiction that keeps us coming back to it, time and again, as if we're all ancient travellers on the same road of life? ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is such a work; whenever I travel I take the book with me, dip into its pages, as if I'm skinny-dipping into familiar waters, revisit its characters and scenes, savor its language and wild flights of imagination. Gertrude Stein once said, "If a book is really true, you'll always need it again." How could a work of fiction be this true, this powerful, this overwhelming in its understanding of the human condition? Damned if I know. And I write fiction all the time, with everything I've got, every muscle and bone in my body. Maybe it's got something to do with "magic realism," with the way you tell a story, not conventionally in a straightforward narrative fashion, but rather, in a series of concentric circles, hovering around the characters, around the events of Macondo and the multigenerational families that occupy the landscape, that live it, breathe it, and make you, the reader, part of it.

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Excellent translation of Marquez's masterpiece

This translation of Marquez's quintessential work does great justice to his remarkable prose. The clarity and depth of Hundred Years' symbolism and the excellent development of the Buendia characters send the reader back to an austere but complicated time - a time of exploration, political upheaval, and social transition. One criticism of this translation is the absence of footnotes to specific historical, cultural, or social elements of life in Colombia in the past two centuries.

"Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude" (p. 199).

Overall, a great read!

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Themes and concepts

I felt this book captured the decay of memories and the human mind with immense efficiency and accuracy. The story of the Buendia family that lasts for 7 generations or so portrays death, wealth, happiness in some regard; however always followed by some disaster, and lastly loss of face and time. One main concept remains the common theme that money does not buy happiness. For example Aureliano Segundo's wealth is extensive, yet he does not find happiness in his wealth or with Fernanda, but rather with his concubine.

I really like the magical aspect of this book in the beginning. Magic allowed my imagination to theorize inventions, possibly irrational ones, just as Jose Acardio Buendia the founder of Macondo imagined bizarre concepts. For me the book lacked substantial plot in the middle once Colonel Aureliano came back and awaited natural death in his silver fish work room and after the tragedy of his sons, yet pick up again once the "conservative" and oppressive Mr. Brown and his banana industry.

The underlying concept I believe to be most important is that the past defines you. It never leaves you, just as Prudencio Aguliar(sp?) followed Jose Acardio Buendia even after he died. The past usually haunted each character; emphasizing and erupting a flame of solitude to encompass each of them forever. Whether their solitude remained their inability to love, or the physical decrepitude over time, or even the family values they were brought up on. However portrayed, peaceful or haunting, solitude as a result of the past defined the characters and the book.

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Thank God for that Family Tree

This is another book I admired more than enjoyed. The term "magic realism" has been coined to describe it, but what Garcia Marquez does, is akin to what Kafka and Joyce have done, but in a style less concise than the former, and less abstract than the latter. He tells the fantastic tale of Macondo and the Buendia family in the most sober of styles, offering up surrealism as part family portrait and part Latin American history.

The repetition of names serves as a device to hermetically seal off the Buendias from the rest of society, thus ensuring their solitude. It can be overwhelming at times, and I frequently had to refer to the family tree to get my bearings. Each member of the clan has unique strengths or attributes, as well as fatal flaws, that isolate them from others. The Buendias seem to be in constant struggle, either with themselves, with the rules of society, or with the natural world in the form of ants, scorpions, and torrential rains that last for almost 5 years. The alchemic quest, the transmutation of the dross into the sublime, seems to be a running theme.

Garcia Marquez is very adept at descriptive imagery, but it seems overused at points. I never felt empathy with any character. There is a lack of pathos in this novel. Outrageous humor is in my opinion, one of the chief qualities of this novel, and probably it's greatest strength, more so to me than the surrealism and obvious symbolism.

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