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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

HarperCollins, 2003 - 432 pages

average customer review:based on 441 reviews
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   highly recommended  highly recommended





Monumental, Mesmerizing!

Most likely the greatest epic I have ever read. The story grips you, pulls you in, and commands 100% of your concentration. Marquez deserves two Nobel Prizes for this tale.


Solitude is Life

There has been renewed interest in the work of the Nobel Prize winning Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The keystone of his work is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" originally published in 1967. A reissue edition of the novel published in 2003 by Harper Collins and translated by Gregory Rabassa tells the story of several generations of residents of the fictional town "Macondo." Like the South American macondo tree, the people of the town have roots both in and above the earth. In simple declarative sentences, a style he learned from his mother's oral histories of her family, Marquez describes every aspect of the lives of the people from birth to death and beyond. Macondo lies in solitude between the mountains and the sea, and the several generations of characters mirror that solitude in their personal understanding of the world. Idiosyncracy and passion are common denominators in the diverse characters who are all full of life but respectful of death. The reader quickly enters the story by learning to abandon the traditional sense of time, space, and social structure. Then Marquez takes the believer on a marvelous conscious and unconscious journey through the human condition.


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dazzling panorama of life & death, love & loss, energy & dissipation

I first read this 33 years ago, while in college, and was utterly wowed at the sweep of these stories, all interlinked yet standing on their own. I was studying the classics - and in particular, oral history - so this was doubly fascinating as a streaming narrative of magical realism.

Having re-read it for the first time, I was again astonished at the life and complexity on every page: you laugh, you weep, you hope, and you judge. The details are woven in with the greatest mastery, and stick in the reader's mind long after the book is finished. My favorite image is the ice scene, which became a touchstone in my memory 33 years ago. The story throbs with life you can enter, while remaining unbelievable. It is as good as any mythology and so much of it remains unexplained.

The structure of the narrative is essentially circles within circles: there is a powerful founder (who can pull a horse down by its ears) who founds a city; he is an inspired man and leader, who degenerates yet still controls or sets in motion everything that happens over the next 100 years. The variations in the family are fabulously well portrayed, as they superimpose themselves back on eachother in endless patterns of repetition - skill, intelligence, beauty, political conviction are not enough to break out of the essential pattern. The only thing that will precipitate an end is to reach the end of the largest circle, which is related to the Sanskrit manuscripts written by the greatest friend of the founder, a mysterious gypsy.

What makes the whole thing work is the characters, who are wonderfully succinct and pass through a hundred years as naturally as the cycle of plants. While some readers hate this, I found it utterly charming and exotic, yet chillingly psychologically real. Even with ghosts and miracles.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. The work is so rich and experimental that it is unclassifiable. It made me feel wonder all over again, even in middle age. I would posit that this is a work of genius. Warmly recommended.


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Another off the list of "to be read sometime".

I can add little to that from other reviewers, except I hate to see an author built up too much for just being "different". This book would have been much more accessible to readers had he not been quite so inventive (or cute). Just because you can do something is not a reason to go ahead and do it. The story and the style would not have suffered by a little less "magical" and a little more "realism". It's one thing to make the readers have to work some and another to deliberately make things more confusing than needed (re: keeping track of the characters).

Did I really, really enjoy it? No, but it was a very interesting read and I am glad I read it.


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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10



One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize?winning career.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master.

Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race.




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