One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

Other authorsGregory Rabassa (Translator)
Hardcover, 2003

Publication

Harper (2003), 422 p.

Original publication date

1967

Awards

Description

The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family.

User reviews

LibraryThing member ferebend
There's a lot going on in this novel at any given time. In a nutshell, the plot goes like this: A lot of really shitty things happen to a lot of really shitty people (who are all related and all have the same name) over a long period of time... oh, and there's magic.

Seriously, that about covers it.
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There isn't much of a plot, per se. Basically, the story chronicles the lives of the Buendia family who, along with some other, nameless, disenfranchised individuals, decide to head deep into unsettled territory, build their own town and live out their lives free of others' influence.

No less then six generations of the family are covered. As is common in Hispanic cultures (I think?), there's a lot of name recycling going on. Coupled with the fact that the characters tend to be incredibly long-lived, promiscious and (sometimes) incestuous, it gets really confusing. At one point, there are approximately 22 characters named 'Aureliano.' Not far into the book, I decided to abandon all hope of keeping track of exactly what's happening to whom and consign myself to reading through in a semi-aware fog.

What is obvious about practically everyone in the family, though, is that they are extremely fucked up. To the point where they can't really be taken seriously. No one has normal relationships and no one exhibits normal feelings. It's a wonder the family even survived until the sixth generation, until you consider the aforementioned promiscuity.

Anyway, the original Buendia's efforts to isolate themselves ultimately fail, as the world slugs on into more modern times and makes inroads everywhere. The first to come are the gypsies. The gypsies are magic. No, really. They have flying carpets. Flying carpets which actually fly. The town grows significantly over the years as various peoples barge in to claim their own stake in the (surprising) prosperity, with lots of really terrible consequences for the original habitants. Not that it really matters, because they're horrible people anyway, but I digress.

Can you tell I didn't really like this book? Reading it was somewhat akin to listening to the ramblings of an old, senile man. Disjointed, exaggerated, superstitious, etc. The only thing that held the story together was the continued existence of the original matriarch, Ursula, who lived to be astonishingly old. But even she couldn't last forever. (That wasn't a spoiler. There's a shitload of death in this book and it doesn't exactly come as a surprise.)

Oh, and there's magic...
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LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
I've always been uneasy with how all the positive superlatives imply disbelief. "Not credible! So unlikely it amazes me! Like something out of a fantasy! You just, you just wonder how it could possibly be!"

This book is not incredible, amazing, fantastic or wonderful. What it is is so inventive,
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surprising, and heartachingly good. I called Calvino's "Baron in the Trees" "magic idealism" once and thought I was making a tentative redefinition, but reading this I realize the difference between magic realism and Calvino's idealism - in a way not meant to limit his immensity but merely to pay tribute, Garcia Marquez is like Calvino with the dirt mixed in.

There were two momoents when he got smug about his own magisterialness and I fronted to myself like they were going to be enough for me to give this book a 4.5 (not that I usually think about the rating while I'm reading, and not that I had it in for this book or anything, but I expected so much to enjoy it that I guess I was just being ornery). When that man fell from the roof and instead of gore from his broken head out leaked the perfumed oil of true love, I was vanquished.

You quiver with the fear of the magic fading, because my god, the 20th century is coming! And banana companies and later coke and FARC I guess! But no. It doesn't sag, it swells. It swells. And then the whole mythology disappears in kudzu and whirlwind.

Fuck it. This book is incredible, amazing, fantastic and wonderful.
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LibraryThing member readingwithtea
I know that this is one of the classic pieces of literature of our time, a seminal work, etc etc etc. I found it confusing and despondent.

For a start, every male character seemed to be called José Arcadio or Aureliano. Every single one. One character called Aureliano has 18 sons, all called
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Aureliano. Given the mixing of generations due to poverty, laziness and incest, it was at times impossible to figure out which man was which!

The positive parts were dreamlike – stories of alchemy and little gold fishes and Sanskrit manuscripts and incredible riches brought on by unnaturally fertile farmyards – and thus unbelievable. The negative parts, in which people died of insanity, frustrated love, or simply wandering off into the world never to be heard from again, were so tragic that they became melodramatic and laughable. Also the “magical realism” was present in the wrong quantities – it came across as a nifty way out of a plot-hole, rather than a running thread, as women lived to be 145 and rain fell steadily for 5 years.

However, the book is 500 pages long and I found myself churning through it at over 100 pages per hour, so there is clearly something to be said for the writing. Marquez (Garcia Marquez?) evoked the Caribbean atmosphere with the oppressive heat, dreamy men and feisty women with skill. I just wasn’t interested in the story he told.
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LibraryThing member brokenangelkisses
I knew this book was famous and that its author had won a Nobel Prize; in fact, I was slightly concerned about reading it because I usually find that books which are covered in impressive accolades fail to live up to their hype. (‘The greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years’,
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boasts the Penguin edition on the front cover – crikey! I’d better like it then, or I’m clearly an ignorant savage.) However, I was totally unaware that it was a ‘magical realism’ novel, which would have been useful to know before I started reading it with more conventional expectations. I have not read anything from this genre before, but it seems to mean that when amazingly beautiful daughters disappear into the sky, nobody bats an eyelid. And that it can rain for four years. Solidly. And that whole towns can suffer from insomnia plagues that give them ever-worsening amnesia, until they need to label cows with ‘This is the cow. She must be milked every morning.’ Magic realism means, in short, that anything is possible.

Of course, knowing this might have prevented me from trying it at all, but if anything was really going to put me off, it would have been the family tree at the beginning. Family trees at the beginning of books suggest two things to me: firstly, that the novel will move between generations in families, preventing me from following one or even a few characters through to a satisfying conclusion; secondly, that I will struggle to understand the novel without referring to it.

Setting my prejudices aside, I settled down to read and was struck by the famous opening sentence:

‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’

I was enthralled by the possibilities, and the next few lines clearly set out the notion that this was a history of a family and a town. It is an odd sort of history though because, as the opening makes clear, the narrative moves restlessly between past, present and future without ever referencing specific dates or really suggesting any particular length of time. The narrative alights upon a particular time frame and character and lingers there for a while, like a butterfly hovering, then neatly hops into another time frame, often only prefaced with something like ‘When Aureliano was older…’ In this way, Marquez creates a sense that what happens is constantly happening and un-happening: everything is cyclical but also moving towards death. This is also emphasised by the repetition of character names through generations: each Aureliano and Arcadio inherits their original namesakes’ strengths and deficiencies, seemingly doomed to sustain a blinkered view of the world that ultimately destroys them.

Insofar as the novel is chronological, the reader follows the development of the town as it becomes gradually industrialised and insidiously controlled by a despotic government who gradually become an irrelevance in a fading world. The way this is told, the progress often sounds faintly mythical in its steady growth and strange appearance. The book could be considered a commentary on modern society and the way it ultimately decays in on itself. The possibility of this and many other potential interpretations is what kept me reading even when I found (or rather, confirmed) that magic realism really isn’t one of my preferred reading genres. The multiplicity of bizarre events and repetition of points seemed to suggest that there must be an overall meaning to the work.
It is ultimately a dark story, although it is brightened considerably by the almost poetic language. Whether this is Marquez or the translator of this edition I don’t know, but at times this is what kept me reading when the episodic nature of the novel itself suggested a natural moment to stop. The family tree became essential as I read on and Marquez spent less time on each subsequent generation, or perhaps simply spread himself thinner by following the lives of several members of each generation. This could make for quite frustrating reading: which Amaranta was this? At what point in the family’s turbulent history was this Arcadio disappearing into the background?

I nearly stopped reading out of irritation, but once I had completed the whole novel I was seduced by the ending into feeling more generously towards the story; I would suggest to anyone who is tempted to give up that it is worth continuing for the sense of closure and mystery that the ending allows. Of course, I was four fifths of the way through already, so if you’re only a few chapters in and loathing it, then I probably wouldn’t bother. Actually, it’s worth noting at this point that the chapters are extremely long, as are the paragraphs, which can stretch to a page and a half easily, in small font, with very little dialogue. In fact, there’s very little reported conversation between characters, which adds to the sense that they are all isolated from each other and the world. Two consecutive lines of speech is the most you’ll find, followed by another lengthy passage describing attitudes, feelings and the passing of time.

So is it worth reading? If you’re a fan of magical realism, or think you could grow to be, then yes. If you’re just picking it up because ‘it’s a classic’ I’d recommend thinking more carefully about its likely appeal. Although I was not gripped by the storyline, in retrospect the meandering style is quite enjoyable and the strangeness gently interesting, so it’s certainly worth trying if you’re looking for something a bit different.
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LibraryThing member Cecrow
So long as its fantastic elements entertain more than frustrate you, you'll enjoy this book as much as I did. It took a few pages before I got my head around the 'magical realism' style, by which impossible events are related in precisely the same tone as the mundane. A tiny isolated village that's
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set in a world so recent that things still lack for names - yet it's visited annually by gypsies introducing the latest fabulous inventions ... which turn out to be magnets, telescopes, a magnifying glass ... And the oddities keep on coming. I had to resolve quickly to read this book like I would learn a new language - by obtaining a gradual feel for it and just be carried along, rather than focussing overmuch on finding the rules. From that point on I didn't find reading difficult (although I was thankful for the family tree diagram; all those Aurelianos!)

Solitude is clearly the primary theme, emphasized by the title and the repeated use of the word. Solitude meaning 'aloneness without loneliness', the members of the Buendia family form practically an encyclopedia of reasons why this would be sought: bitterness over a lost love or lost war; senility and insanity; scholastic or religious pursuit; finding others impossible to understand; pride and self-delusion; angelic innocence; guilt and self-punishment; forced into hiding from injustice; single-minded determination to achieve a goal; etc. In many instances this quest for solitude is pressed upon the characters by circumstance, so calling this book a "crowning achievement for the voice of the marginalized" I can understand. When that's extrapolated to view the novel as metaphor for Latin America at the time of its writing, I grasp why it's a "great novel of the Americas." But this book isn't nearly so gloomy as the gloomy theme makes it sound. It's often just plain fun, with a surprisingly gripping ending, and it may be doing more harm than good to study it too closely. In the author's own words: "Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves."
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LibraryThing member HankIII
I must be missing something about this one, and whatever it is, I know it's not much.I didn't enjoy it; I wanted it to be a fulfilling and rewarding read; I want it to be everything that everyone else said it was and then some.So, I learned that some works aren't worth it--not worth reading, not
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worth the time, and not worth putting faith in what others may deem "a beautiful book."Marquez pops characters in and out with different brief activities and events, scattering them into a literary collage; humans with tails, and a girl who eats dirt..those things would be interesting if a story was surrounding each one, but there isn't. It's like going to a carnival looking through a peep hole and seeing a freak of nature briefly.To just pop these abnormalities in as being convincing, which it sure as hell isn't, seems to be stretching the point of lucidity and literary, and after that, I stopped reading--because there's a big difference in reading and just wallowing in a collage of intellectual masturbation where events and names are continuously wrapped around the charming misnomer:"magic realism." Ultimately, it's monotonous, confusing, and in the end boring as hell.I've given it no stars because I'm so full of magic realism. I'm real and can perform magic,and I'm far more convincing than this pretentious work ever could be. Watch me: I'm waving my literary wand and sending 100 Days of Boring Crap on a magic carpet ride directly into my "crap that actually got published" bin. BRAVO!
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LibraryThing member cbl_tn
In reading this novel, I discovered that magical realism isn't for me. I was tempted to abandon it at several points (but I'm glad I didn't). It was like reading a dream – a dream that never ends. I might have enjoyed the journey more if it had been a shorter one. Today, though, I feel like I've
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been reading it for 100 years.

I'm sure I missed most of the symbolism. I had such a hard time keeping all of the José Arcadios, Aurelianos, Remedioses, and Amarantas straight that I didn't have enough energy left to think about the deeper meaning of the story. The family tree at the front of the book helped a little, but not a lot.

I'd like to find an essay (nothing longer) that would help me unpack what I've read. I'm not going to avoid magical realism completely. I read Midnight's Children a year ago and liked it much better than I liked this book. I do think that this is a genre that I want to read sparingly, though.
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LibraryThing member bokai
I was introduced to Marquez through Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and found it delightful, but odd. When I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude I was not anticipating something so completely different, so epic in scope and ambitious in design. Memories, was great, not to knock it, but it was
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individual where One Hundred Years of Solitude is generational. It's been years now since I've read either novel, but here is the gist of my impressions.

You have here a novel that works as both a simple character drama, with magical element accentuating the oddities of human nature we all posses, and a novel that zooms out and looks at an entire bloodline and the relationships people might have to history itself. The story starts at the founding of a town, and ends in its destruction. While I don't think elaborating on the ending to this novel could any more spoil it than saying that Beethoven's 5 ends in one note or the other would spoil that, I'll keep my mouth shut, because the ending is one of the most epic that I've ever read.

Yes, things can get confusing when you have a handful of characters all named the same thing, but the confusion is part of it all. And, personally, I found it to be useful to take the approach of not really caring if I got one character mixed up with another. It doesn't matter all that much, in the end.
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LibraryThing member silversurfer
One of the greatest pieces of works ever writen...One of my all time favoirte books.
LibraryThing member Tiree
An interesting premise and beautifully written, but it took me about seven months to finish it, and I only did so because it's one of my husband's favorite novels.

Apart from the annoyance of characters having similar or even the same name that makes it confusing to follow their storyline (hint:
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there's a family tree at the beginning that I didn't discover until about 1/4 of the way in; it makes a BIG difference), my biggest complaint about this story is how disconnected I felt to the characters. These characters are so isolated from one another that I couldn't help but feel the same about them as a reader. It truly is 100 years of solitude that they live, and as beautiful and as imaginative as the writing may be, I simply couldn't fall in love with the characters as individuals nor their story as a whole. And to me, it's that emotional connection that makes a story truly great.
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LibraryThing member bookworm12
This book is lauded as one of the greatest of the 20th Century. It’s been on my TBR shelf for years and now that I’ve finally read it I feel like I’m still in the dark.

The plot, and I use that term loosely, follows the Buendía clan. Patriarch José Arcadio Buendía founds the fictional town
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of Macondo. Beginning with his life, the book chronicles seven generations in the family’s history. There are so many overlapping names within the family tree that things can seem a bit muddled at times. Up and down and in and out of the characters’ lives, we see romances blossom, an insomnia plague, military occupation and more.

The Buendía family is a pretty incestuous bunch. One man marries his adopted sister, another has an affair with his aunt, another marries his first cousin, etc. There is a serious focus on beauty, lust and how it almost inevitably leads to destruction or unhappiness. From the very first generations, the Buendía chose immediate infatuation over long term consequences.

As many others have said before me, the writing really is beautiful. Márquez can paints a lovely picture, but I always felt like I was just outside of the room where the action was happening if that makes sense. I never felt connected to the story in any real way. I know magical realism isn’t for everyone, but I’m not sure if that was the issue or if it was just the lack of a clear storyline. I feel like I had an open mind and no specific expectations going into the book, but it was still hard for me to feel compelled by the characters.

The aspect of the book that was actually the most interesting to me was its inspiration. Márquez said he decided to write the novel after his Grandmother told him stories about her childhood that wove unbelievable supernatural elements into her everyday life. He said she told the stories as though there was nothing magical in them and so he never doubted them. He wanted to create a world within his novel where the same was true.

BOTTOM LINE: Confusing and strange, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a classic but it's not for everyone. I'm glad I read it and I think I understand magical realism a bit more. I may try to re-read it in the future and see if the style clicks for me.

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

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”
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LibraryThing member santhony
I recently read the author’s acclaimed work “Love in the Time of Cholera” and enjoyed it very much. It spurred me to seek out more work by Marquez, hence this and several others that I recently purchased.

Marquez’s writing is certainly unique in its earthiness. He deals with such subjects as
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sex, bodily functions and graphic illness as if they are parts of everyday life … because they are. It is refreshing. Marquez is also known as one of the leading practitioners of the literary device of “magical realism” in which events are introduced into the story which are quite fantastic (for example, a character being swept away into the sky as though taken to heaven, a rain event that lasts over four years followed by an absolute drought of ten years).

At its heart, this is the story of a remote South American village, from its founding, growth, prosperity, decline and ultimately through its destruction, as seen through the prism of a single extended family. In something of an annoyance, the numerous generations of the family all have the same or very similar names and usually inhabit the same time frame. So, you might have three or four actors with virtually the same name inhabiting the stage at once. This can be very confusing, especially when resuming the story after a night’s sleep. Luckily, the author includes a family tree in the front of the book, a page I visited with regularity.

The author’s writing is indisputably beautiful and at times mesmerizing. However, I must say that I enjoyed LitToC quite a bit more, simply because it actually contained what I found to be a haunting and compelling story. I felt that the writing here dragged at times, but that’s just me, a philistine. In my world, beautiful writing, in and of itself, can only take you so far before you need an end to the means (at least I do).
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LibraryThing member anyotherbizniz
Just started rereading it. My memory of my first reading some twenty years ago was that I thought it was the best novel of the 20th century. Let's see how I feel when I have reread it all these years on.
LibraryThing member girlfromshangrila
This is a classic of literature in Spanish that everyone should read at least once before they die. I first read it -in Spanish- when I was still very young and impressionable. I didn't like the story at all! It is so very bleak and confusing and hard to follow. And that end... oh! I would never
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recommend this to anyone under 18, not because of any overly 'adult' material, but because of its convoluted subplots and rather problematic themes.

However, Garcia Marquez is an impressive storyteller with a masterful use of language. He is a brilliant writer, honestly. His descriptions really take you to that convoluted little town in the middle of nowhere, beaten by poverty, by illnesses, by the war, by the weather.

I did not enjoy the -rather terrible- story, but the writing is of such caliber that I would put myself through the torture of the story again, just for Marquez's artistry as a writer.
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LibraryThing member Peter_Forster
A novel that is made entirely worthwhile by the stunning final few pages in which the whole novel telescopes into the moment of reading. At once a sweeping exploration of Columbian history and a beautifully woven tapestry of banal magic and the magic of the banal. Of course, it must be said that
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this is an incredibly confusing novel and so the reader is left a little like Aureliano--spending the whole book trying to decipher what is going on only to find that he is "deciphering as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror." This is perhaps what the novel is really about, and the hundred years of solitude required to get through its 400 hundred odd pages are consequently ultimately worthwhile.
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LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C
This novel taking in six generations of the Buendía family of Macondo is considered one of the candidates for the great novel of the 20th century. I started this book with quite a bit of trepidation, since I had the impression this was one of those "difficult" works, such as those by James Joyce
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or William Faulkner. So I was relieved to find this readable (at least compared to Joyce), but eventually I found this not to my taste. I have had decidedly mixed reactions to magical realism and this definitely falls into that genre. There are gypsies with flying carpets, ghosts, an insomnia plague, alchemy, rainfalls that last for years and other whimsies. The narrative is a non-linear meandering omniscient, with long discursive sentences and paragraphs pages long, and very little dialogue. To give you a flavor of the prose style, here's a bit of description (of sex--but don't worry, work safe.)

On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud. But she bore the impact with a firmness of character and a bravery that were admirable. José Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her language.

I think that gives a sense of the whimsical imagery and content. Poetic, bizarre, and would you know what that was describing if I hadn't told you? I did love Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which I read a few months ago--and that was also magical realism--but it was also first person, had voice to burn, and a lot of humor. Both books actually purport to tell the story of their countries--India and Colombia (or so I've been told in the case of Marquez's book). But while in Midnight's Children the connections are pretty clear, even to someone not familiar with the history, the events and imagery of One Hundred Years of Solitude are highly symbolic and the connections largely lost on me. It might have been all the more convoluted since this is a multi-generational novel whose members tended to blur (didn't help almost every male seemed to be named Aureliano or Arcadio) rather than told through the life of one person. For whatever reason, I never really felt immersed by the novel. It was slow, it dragged, sometimes I felt as if it were taking a hundred years to read. I admire some of the writing and imagination, but rather distantly.

After this read I'm undecided about reading Love in the Time of Cholera; Marquez is a good enough writer I can't quite cross him off my list, and I've heard that novel isn't magical realism and many who don't like Solitude do love Cholera.
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LibraryThing member calvin_xa
I would like to like marquez. my spanish-speaking friends love his stuff. This for me was one long, confusing genealogy project in novel form. Full of really random stuff like the kid with the oversized genitals and the massacre. It was so sparsely connected and completely illogical that it felt
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like one of my own dreams.
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LibraryThing member curbyourentropy
Magic realism does have its weak points. For example, I didn't really care about the characters in a meaningful way--they seemed empty, unaware, like pawns in Garcia's genre. I found myself only caring about them inasmuch as they provided me with a sense of familiarity with the story. I grieved for
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the passing of the characters from generation to generation, but only because I missed the connection I did have with those characters and their lives, and I didn't want that familiarity to disappear. That being said, I guess that's the genius of the novel. It takes you from one generation to another, creating and destroying and recreating your sense of comfort and familiarity and connectedness with each generation... Taking you in and out of the solitude that the story itself is about. Or something. I don't know. It really is an enjoyable read, though, and very well written. And the ending is fantastic.
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LibraryThing member Stbalbach
Marquez, born 1927, published Solitude when he was about 40 in 1967, the same year I was born, and I was about 40 when I first read it in 2007, "in medias res". It is from this perspective of being in the "middle of things" that it is possible to understand the novel.

Themes of inter-generational
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similarities and solitude becomes very much a part of life when sandwiched between the twin responsibilities of caring for both the younger and elder generations.

For me, the novel became increasingly tedious towards the end as old characters died and new characters appear, all with the same names, it becomes difficult to even care anymore, creating a sense of despair and pessimistic pre-determinism that I did not find enjoyable.
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LibraryThing member kaminariman
Probably the single most excellent piece of literature I have read as of yet.. While reading it, I was overwhelmed by the sense of depth and complexity that the text brought forth at every turn, yet I was constantly drawn forward by the matter-of-factness and loving, but not excessive, attention to
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detail of the prose. This book is unique in that it has many main characters, namely the members of the Buendia family who walk through time in what seems to be a circular fashion, enduring events both realistic and mythical. From the beginning the author expresses intent to make the very town of Macondo a character, possibly the most important.
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LibraryThing member jakjonsun
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a fascinating allegory of the unconscious -- a world of magical and mythical dreamscapes gradually reduced to the mundaneness of ordinary life. The work celebrates the fiery energy of creative expression, but also the dissipation of that energy. By the end of the
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novel, the reader is drawn not to the story particularly but to the imagination behind the story. We are left to contemplate the mysterious relationship between imagination and actuality. Does the profound impression by the author's imagination constitute something real? The author presumably and resoundingly says yes, as the final chapters, pages, and sentences inch towards actualization ( completion! wholeness! ). Only in decline and death can the imagination's creation be actualized -- a stirring of the soul to a greater awareness and love.
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LibraryThing member clmerle
I finished the goddamned thing. It's not a bad book. Bits of it are interesting, but it just didn't do it for me, and the book became a chore to read about halfway through. Perhaps, I should have read some shorter works of GGM's first and I might have appreciated it better.
LibraryThing member jmoncton
This is the type of book that polarizes people into 2 camps - those that LOVE it and those that say "huh?". Unfortunately, I fall into the latter camp. Yes, it was lyrical and at times the writing was beautiful, but I kept on waiting for this book to click, for that 'aha' moment where I would
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understand why everyone had one name or the other, or see some amazing revelation to this unusual mythical town. But, I finished the book several weeks ago and it's all one big blur. No epiphany or more complete understanding of the meaning of life for me.
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LibraryThing member BCCJillster
One of the must reads. It's a total experience and you just have to submerge yourself and go with the flow. Don't try to "understand" it--just be in the moment with Marquez. Give yourself over to this world for a while.
LibraryThing member kattepusen
Yes, this is a seriously engaging book, and as far as the style of "magical realism" goes - this one has it ALL. However, even though I enjoyed reading it and could not leave it alone for any long periods of time, I was still a bit disappointed by this family-saga classic, and I must admit I am
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much more fond of Marquez' "Love in the Time of Cholera".

I found it a pretty easy read, and that might actually be part of the problem - I feel it is actually too easy...Most aspects of the story, including the people and all their thoughts and feelings, are almost "over-explained", which does not leave the characters with any mysteries. I almost felt cheated out of my desire to ponder their personalities, thoughts and actions - perhaps with the exception of Remedios the Beauty, where the author resists the urge to dissect her interior emotions.

As a sidenote, I kept referring to the family chart in the beginning of the book quite often. Some readers have complained that the book is hard to follow due to all the similar names in the family tree that appear with regular intervals in the different generations. When I state that the story is too "easy" I am mainly referring to the portrayals of the charcters and not Marquez' elaborate construction of generational relationships.

Overall, I liked the descriptions of the town, landscapes and scenery the best since Marquez left me something for my own imagination.

In conclusion, I liked the book, but I did not love it
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Media reviews

Chatelaine
C’est touffu, drôle, cocktail enivrant de fiction et de réalité.
16 more
LeSoir
Comme dans Cent ans de solitude, qui n’adopte pas une forme linéaire mais traverse le temps en spirale, de manière jubilatoire. Ce livre, exemplaire de ce qu’on a appelé le « réalisme magique » sud-américain, a pris très vite une place majeure dans les lettres espagnoles et son
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influence a débordé au-delà de cette zone linguistique.
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The Observer
May it, finally, be hoped that this enthralling, exceedingly comic novel will not encounter the lazy indifference that other Latin American novels have met with in this country.
The New York Review of Books
Márquez forces upon us at every page the wonder and extravagance of life, while compassionately mocking its effusions; and when the book ends with its sudden self-knowledge and its intimations of holocaust, we are left with that pleasant exhaustion which only very great novels seem to provide; for
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they allow us, in a moment of exquisite balance, to hold a vision—to be sure, in some fear, but also with humor—of the beginnings and ends to all the enterprises of living.
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The New York Times
…to isolate details, even good ones, from this novel is to do it particular injustice. Márquez creates a continuum, a web of connections and relationships.
The Washington Post
This extraordinary novel obliterates the family tree in a prose jungle of overwhelming magnificence …
The Guardian
One Hundred Years of Solitude offers plenty of reflections on loneliness and the passing of time. It can also be seen as a caustic commentary on the evils of war, or a warm appreciation of familial bonds. García Márquez has urgent things to say that still feel close to home, 50 years after the
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book was first published.
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Salman Rushdie
The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years
Emma Thompson
The book that sort of saved my life
Sunday Telegraph
No lover of fiction can fail to respond to the grace of Márquez's writing
Book World
Fecund, savage, irresistible. . . . In all their loves, madness, and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths...the characters rear up large and rippling with life against the green pressure of nature itself.
Variety
One of the seminal works of 20th century Latin American fiction, it is a classic.
New York Times Book Review
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity,
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wit, wisdom, and poetry that is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man. . . . Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life
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Washington Post Book World
More lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man.
LitHub
At 50 years old, García Márquez's masterpiece is as important as ever. . . To experience a towering work like One Hundred Years of Solitude is to be reminded of the humility we should all feel when trying to assert what is true and what is false.
New York Times
An irresistible work of storytelling, mixing the magic of the fairy tale, the realistic detail of the domestic novel and the breadth of the family saga.
The Independent
One Hundred Years of Solitude is substantive and substantial, and its prose precise for the simple reason that its sentences are too exquisite to be inessential. It is a novel on which is bestowed the laurels usually awarded to great works of frugal prose. Yet its genius is in the operatic telling

Language

Original language

Spanish

ISBN

9780060531041

Physical description

422 p.; 6.13 inches

Other editions

Pages

422

Library's rating

Rating

(9693 ratings; 4.2)
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