Penguin Random House One Hundred Years Of Solitude (international Writers S.)

Some say, some books, you should never read again in later life. I’ve heard it said, for instance, that having enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye when one was seventeen, that it is a mistake to return to it in middle or later years. Thomas Mann prescribes the reading of his The Magic Mountain, “not once, but twice” – though omits to specify any interval. Having just finished reading ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I feel that this is a novel that one could beneficially revisit several times throughout one’s lifetime – say every two decades? And that’s quite a numerically reasonable suggestion because if - as at least two of the many characters in this narrative do – you live to the age of one hundred, that’s only five reads in a lifetime. For me however, there’s a snag. Somehow, when this novel was published and I was seventeen, I slipped through the net of readership, this is my first reading, and now at the age of seventy-three – according to my own perhaps rashly-prepared gospel – quite possibly it will be my only reading! A shame, because this is one of the richest, most dense, detailed, dreamlike, formalist, symbolic, mysterious, magical, funny - I had some good laughs, and some nightmares! – pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Painting equivalents? The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, Guernica, The Persistence of Memory might give one some idea of the level of detail – not necessarily content – one’s in for. There are twenty-four main protagonists agonising over seven generations of the BUENDIA family in this intense stylish saga which more or less coincides with the crackly political and social history of Colombia between the years 1820 and 1920. Unsurprisingly the plot is baffling. Its weave is not unlike that of a Wilton carpet, so instead of 'U' shaped yarns, the fibre is woven all the way through the carpet and then sheared to create a range of cut and loop textures. Every so often characters pop up to the surface, having travelled invisibly under the substrate for scores of pages, and years. Sometimes without any apparent explanation, build or lead in. The reader might be forgiven in thinking that s/he had one foot in a William Burroughs cut-and-paste text and the other in a David Bowie lyric. It might cause annoyance to a convergent thinker, but just relax and enjoy passages such as; ‘when he asked for the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen on this earth, all the women brought him their daughters. He became lost in misty byways, in figures reserved for oblivion, in the labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one’s thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages.’ But there’s much more than the apparently ‘cut-and-paste’ plot. Here are just some of the themes and symbols which go fuguing away throughout the narrative; gold, ice, buried treasure, death – particularly by firing squad, the death of birds flying into things, incest, the invisibility of people, cannibalism, and of course solitude. There are curious repeat mentions of anointings, lye, chamber pots, small candy animals, gypsies, macaws, small golden fishes, the drawing of chalk circles, begonias and the requirement – or not, a political reference – to paint one’s house either blue or red. So, I leave you with a few further almost edible Marquezian phrases; ‘more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his,’ or ‘solitude had made a selection in her memory, and had burned the nostalgic piles of dimming waste that life had accumulated in her heart,’ or how about, ‘the journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem’? But perhaps we should attribute at least some of this tickly prose to Gregory Rabassa his translator?

García Márquez Nobel prize for literature winning novel is a good novel. It is set over 100 years; the Buendia family over 7 generations so as time lapses times change. It is an interesting book as it is a fantasy novel or magic realism or a surealistic life. It is also a comic book. The imagination is incredible. It is well written but I did find the names difficult to follow who was who. I will read other books by this author.

“What did you expect?” he murmured. “Time passes.” This novel is the rich and colourful account of one tumultuous century of love and war. It documents the lifetime of Macondo, a solitary town hidden in a jungle in South America. We follow the lives of the notorious Buendia family from the patriarch of the story, Jose Arcadio Buendia, to the last of their line, Aureliano Babilonia, who dies swept away in the biblical hurricane that wipes Macondo from the face of the earth. It is hard to pin this story down to its raw materials as there is a vast multitude of interweaving storylines, but Marquez manages to capture an entire century through the lyrical portrayal of the most ordinary and extraordinary moments. These moments form a vibrant photo album that knits together the lives of the Buendias through all their many trials. One of the most distinctive features of this work is how Marquez incorporates the supernatural into the depiction of the natural so that it appears as just that: natural. He once said that he wanted to write like his grandmother used to tell him stories. She would relate the epic, magical stories with a dead-pan expression as though she was describing the weather. This magic realism is certainly essential to the success of the novel, but I do not think this is what makes it so powerful... Magic enhances the captured moments but it is humanity itself that endures. It is the most fundamental human desires, fears and oddities that are so captivating because, made so vivid by the magical elements of the story world, they touch our hearts. This book is an exploration of what it is to be human. And so the over-arching themes of the novel emerge. For so ambitious a work there are of course many, but I would highlight three, three that run like veins throughout the story, the lifeblood of the novel: solitude, sexuality and time. These allow for the exploration of humanity at its most intense. I say ‘most intense’ as the characters are ruled by their deepest desires, passions and doubts, which, in their solitude, become the masters of their fates. Today we are still influenced by our basest passions, however, these become buried beneath the monotony of modernity. One Hundred Years of Solitude highlights the fundamental truth that it is our passion that makes us human, and in our solitude, these passions can destroy us. It is Jose Arcadio Buendia’s wife, Ursula Iguaran, that marches inexorably on through the decades as a seemingly eternal guardian to her family, far more of a matriarch than her husband is a patriarch. It is she who is the custodian of their honour, their prosperity, their happiness. Undoubtedly my favourite character, she is not corrupted by passion as all the others are over the six generations, but is strengthened by it. She reminds me of a medieval Mrs Weasley. Or rather, Mrs Weasley reminds me of a wand-wielding Ursula! The novel ends on the poignant and terrible note of solitude. Macondo was created from the passion of its founders, the inexhaustible fuel of their hopes and dreams, and it passes away into legend, forgotten, lost in the eternal potency of its memories. Its fate is predetermined, a city of mirrors to be shattered into a city of mirages, in turn, shattering the illusion of a brave new world and delivering the fatalistic moral that destruction is inevitable. History is mapped out before us intrepid humans and time repeats itself as we embark on the same journeys, doomed to our destinies of disillusionment and eventual destruction... In short, Macondo is consumed by time. “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle."

This book has one of the best opening lines I've come across; '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's a great first line, simply because it asks two or three questions, forcing the reader to read on to find out the answers, and for this reason alone I truly wish I could finish the book for I was genuinely enjoying it, but the fact that everyone has the same name was just too much for me. I found myself constantly going back to the family tree at the beginning to see who on earth was who ….. and even then that confused me. You've got José Arcadio Buendía, who's the head of the family, and his sons Aureliano and José Arcadio. Aureliano has a son who he names Aureliano José. Meanwhile José Arcadio has a son called Arcadio. Now Arcadio’s daughter is Remedios the Beauty, and I think that’s the same Remedios who marries Aureliano (the one who faces the firing squad). Arcadio (not José Arcadio, you understand, he’s his father, just Arcadio) also has two sons, Aureliano Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo. Now Aureliano Segundo has three children who he names …… Confused yet? Try reading the book!! Suffice to say, at 17% I was finding it too much like hard work and had to give up on it. Shame. Good story, but a book should be pleasing and enjoyable. Not hard work. Whatever possessed Gabriel García Márquez to give all his characters the same(ish) name I have no idea. But it doesn’t make for easy reading. And I don’t want to work overtime to read a book. I want to enjoy it. What a concept!

To say that the fantastic tale of the Buendías of Macondo is a profound examination of human behaviour, flaws and experience is more than a little pedestrian, but, then again, besides Gabriel García Márquez much is pedestrian. As these behaviours, flaws and experiences are too much to fit into one lifetime, we find characters replayed through generations, and lifespans extended well beyond the norm. The overriding sense is one of benign curiosity about it all; events are observed through detached but not unsmiling eyes. There are many Aurelianos and José Arcadios, for example, and the women may well exceed a hundred years in age. Their lives are played out in a magical world defined by religion and superstition as much as by reality. It may rain for four years; there are thirty-two civil wars; visiting girls need more than seventy chamber pots; a young woman ascends to heaven; and red ants continually threaten foundations, as if they are entropy made visible. It is all disturbingly lit, as if conjured up in a delirium. But it is also a warning. In all this, Márquez scrupulously avoids the sentimental. There is no tugging at the heartstrings; he simply sets out what happens. Ageing is ageing, dispassionately described; madness is madness, people go mad. And he has a twinkle in his eye, too: death is death, but any thoughts of maudlin sentimentality are banished by farce. The confusion of characters with similar names is deliberate, because the more the history of the Buendías unfolds, the more it resembles what has already passed. It is almost fractal. It was repeating before we were born and it will repeat when we are gone, we are led to believe. We expect that as we approach the end there will be more Aurelianos and José Arcadios, spinning off into a future where there will still be hubris, idiocy, infidelity and intransigence. Should we stop taking it all so seriously, and surrender to the absurdity of it all, because it will repeat itself no matter what? Then there is born what Márquez describes as the first child in a hundred years to be engendered with love. But he is born of an incestuous relationship. His father wishes him to be called Aureliano, though by this time the red ants have seen to it that it scarcely matters. The last in the line of that name has already lost his friends and his lover, and, as the spellbinding final pages tighten their grip, he finds he can at last decipher the parchment of a gypsy called Melquíades. As the walls of the city of mirrors collapse around him, we learn that everything that has been written is not, in fact, repeatable. Márquez the magician looks us squarely in the eyes. The twinkle has gone. Beware of sealing yourself off from others, he says; withdrawal will warp you. When the winds blow there will be no-one. You will have no second opportunity.

This is such a wonderful book. The range and breadth of situations, challenges, life problems, joy and most profound heartache that run through the story of one family over 100 years is captivating and fascinating. In that regard the story telling and imagination is incredible. Where I personally struggled with it, was in the fact that so many characters had the same name, at the same time. I know many families around the world do that, but reading quite complex family, romantic and political situations when so many people share the same name, just bewildered me and slowed the pace down. Plus, very often the story telling drifted into the fantastical and supernatural - perhaps that was a reflection of the intended time and age (deep religious and supernatural beliefs) but for me, the "magical" situations diluted the serious drama of the core story. So, I really enjoyed this epic tale, but it was not the most easy of reads.

Review reflecting the quality of the handcover, not the contents of the novel - which is drenched in symbolism, spanning generations of Mocondo and the Buendía family. The paper cover is of a very low quality, essentially printer paper - and when you inevitably remove this as it will get frayed, the hardcover itself is plain orange and is pretty much cardboard. I would expect a handcover print to be more attractive, especially considering how wonderful and essential the story within is.

A commitment to read this book. It is not a read to take on if you don't want to be consumed - a journey on the carnal passions of man, at the base the basic need for love, layers of love, intertwined with the complexity of religion and power. Explorations of capitalism, communism, and the industrial revolution. An interpretation of human life as we know it.

looks good but HATE the netflix logo on the front cover, the netflix logo wasn’t even on the listing image.

I don't have a lot to say except I felt like I was a member of the Buendia family myself by the time I finished reading this. Genuinely difficult to put down.

A fantastic and inspiring book. A true magic realism. There hasn't been another of this kind.

I would like to request everyone who purchased anything just give a review because including me everyone buy something after reading reviews. Let's talk about book so the book is, I would say interesting, confusing, but hard to understand at once, actually if one understand the Buendia family tree you get the store & also the rise and fall of Macondo.

Brilliant book. Should be read junior year in high school and Sophmore year in college.