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Loading... One Hundred Years of Solitude (Essential Penguin)by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  stopsatgreen | Jan 4, 2010 |  I got half way and gave up. Two many characters and the narrative was too erratic for me to follow. I really wanted to like this book and I pushed on a lot longer then I should have as most reading lists note this book as great literature. I guess it just did not work for me. (  ) jmundale | Jan 4, 2010 | I was once told (apologies for the passive voice, but I cannot remember who told me) that One Hundred Years of Solitude was so difficult to read that it might as well be regarded as unreadable. Wrong. Dead wrong. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not merely readable, it’s…eminently readable. It’s clear, it’s marvelous, it’s entrancing. It’s, well, easy to read. More than anything Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnum opus reminded me of the family sagas by Michener or Rutherford. Really, the idea is the same. The story follows a fictional family from generation to generation in order to show a region’s history. The difference is this: Michener and Rutherford do everything in their power to make their creations seem real. They are precise concerning time and place. Their characters interact with real historical figures; their fictional locations are caught up in real historical events. Marquez doesn’t bother with any of that. His Macando makes no pretense to reality. It’s a place beset by insomnia plagues and deluges, a place where travelling gypsies hawk their wares and destiny has a very tangible effect on the world. It’s a place built on legend, not reality. And it’s all the more true for that. (  ) Torikton | Jan 1, 2010 | GGM isn't for everyone or anytime. I've been fortunate to read him at times when I've been able to savour the richness, the weird liquidness of his prose. Cien Años delighted me again. It took me a month, and it may take me longer next time, but that's the thing: there will be a next time. This isn't a book you're done with; it's a story you sort of relish. (  ) EdSantiago | Dec 30, 2009 | "...and her soul brightened with the nostalgia of hr lost dreams." (p.392) Garcia Marquez can bring words to life - e.g. talking about Melquiades: "...although in the last days he lost his appetite and fed only on vegetables. He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians." That sentence made me laugh, do I look forlorn? Realizing at the end that Melquiades was the chronicler of the family - and the one who ties the first to the last. Excellent read, one that probably needs a reread (or three) to appreciate fully 1  bataviabirders | Dec 23, 2009 | 
 [García Márquez] creates a continuum, a web of connections and relationships. However bizarre or grotesque some particulars may be, the larger effect is one of great gusto and good humor and, even more, of sanity and compassion. The author seems to be letting his people half-dream and half-remember their own story and what is best, he is wise enough not to offer excuses for the way they do it. No excuse is really necessary. For Macondo is no never-never land. Its inhabitants do suffer, grow old and die, but in their own way.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0060740450, Paperback)"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."It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics: A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house." With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature. --Alix Wilber (retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:43:13 -0500) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
As many of the characters share names it *can* be difficult to follow; the Penguin edition contains a family tree which you'll refer to often. But it rewards the attention you pay to it, and will continue to reward with each re-reading.
Probably my favourite novel. (