"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 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. ( )

Es uno de esos libros que te envuelve con sus historias, no queres dejar de leer,...y te hace comprender como puede llegar a sentir una persona en este mundo, las diferentes maneras de amar,..me encanto! ( )

This book is a dense, richly woven tapestry of language and characters, so tighly intertwined and overlapped that by the end it is impossible to pull the thread of a single life free from the others around it. For all the density, though, it was a surprisingly fast read. The only confusion I had at any point was with the repetition of the names (in the most extreme example, there are at least twenty characters named Aureliano), and even this need to do a double take about which Aureliano or which José Arcadio we're checking back in with fits the circular and cyclical patterns of the story.

The Buendía family, the house they live in, and the town of Macondo are so connected that it is hard not to think of them as a single entity, and the clashes and periods of relative peace within the microcosm of this one household as representative of the atmosphere in the town as a whole. Also, the surreal elements that Márquez incorporates are done with great subtlety, and within lives and circumstances that are otherwise almost entirely unremarkable. By the time we start questioning Colonel Aureliano Buendía's uncanny ability to thwart attempts on his life, we're too invested in this family and this town and this story to not just take it in stride. And once we've accepted this, it's a short series of very small steps to believing that Ursula or Pilar lived to ages bordering on the absurd, or that there really could be a man who is followed everywhere by a cloud of butterflies, or that one room in the house remains impeccably clean so long as it's inhabited by the ghost of a gypsy watching the progress of generations of the Buendía family attempting to interpret his mysterious parchments...

Excellent read, lovely prose, fascinating characters, highly recommended. ( )

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My alltime favourite ( )