Rating: 
Summary: Read this, it's my favorite book.
Review: I was given this book by a close friend many years ago. "Read this, it's my favorite book," he said. He explained that it was given to him with the same words by someone else. It was the most wonderful gift I have ever been given. I was completely blown away. Since that day, I have bought many copies, and given many away with those same words: "Read this, it's my favorite book." I want everyone I care about to read it. I have sat a non-reader down and read the first chapter to them aloud. I think it is the greatest first chapter ever written and it never ceases to move me. This book makes me cry, it makes me laugh, and I make a point of reading it any time I fall into a funk because it never disappoints me. It is the one constant in my life: My favorite book of all time.
Rating: 
Summary: Not literary
Review: I read this book because Bill Clinton recommended it. I am a science-technology person and not knowing much about what constitutes good literature I rate books by how they 'feel' to me. This is an interesting book. I read it twice a couple of years apart and still don't 'understand' it. I do, however, like the 'feel' of it.
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Summary: Magical Realism
Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude is the Latin American classic which introduced the concept of magical realism, fantastic occurrences told in simple, unexcited prose, as if they were perfectly natural, to the literary world. Can this style keep a reader enchanted for almost 450 pages? No and there are were times when I found myself skimming over details just to get to the next part. Still, Marquez's breakthrough novel is well worth reading. The book captures roughly one hundred years, from the time when, "the world so recent that many things lacked names" to the age of the first automobiles and movie theaters, in the lives of the Buendia family in the mythic village of Macondo. The six generations of Buendias, whose lives are told in the book with a unique poetic motif for each character, are trapped in an endless maze of death, war, love and search for meaning while the kind of magic, which caused a rain of rose petals to fall during the funeral march of Macondo founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, gently slips from their world.
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Summary: Love among the scorpions
Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is fantastic in every meaning of the word. Like an imaginary Bible, it is the story of the beginning and almost apocalyptic end of a world, albeit a microcosm. This "world" is a South American village called Macondo, of which one of the founders is a man named Jose Arcadio Buendia. The novel tells the story of Buendia and five generations of his descendants, the last of whom is carried away by ants (yes, ants) to be devoured. Consider it "The Rise and Fall of the House of Buendia." Or, metaphorically, "The Rise and Fall of Man."
Garcia Marquez writes as though he were spinning a rug of a wildly chaotic and exotic pattern on a loom. Such things as flying carpets, an insomnia plague, a levitating priest, a trickle of human blood that propels itself through village streets, a rainfall of yellow flowers, a girl whose erotic fragrance drives men to acts of desperation, a man whose appearances are preceded by a swarm of butterflies, "invisible" doctors, a future-telling witch who lives to an unthinkable age, and a five-year-long rainfall are just some of the wonders to be found within its pages. However, there is an eerie cohesion that blends these elements with the realistic backdrop of the narrative, so that the novel feels as natural as walking down the street. For comparison's sake, it contains the kind of mixture of fantasy and realism used by writers like Gunter Grass and Salman Rushdie. The novel does not have an arching plotline; it is more like a collection of connected anecdotes, but there is an overall plan to the events which unite the Buendia dynasty. The narrative has a tendency to fast forward and reverse chronologically so that a situation introduced early is resolved later in the action, usually with an ironic surprise. For example, the novel begins with Jose's son, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, facing a firing squad; how he got into this predicament is explained later, along with his uncanny knack for escaping death. The idiosyncrasies of the characters are another focus of the novel. Jose, the patriarch, has a fascination with new gadgets sold to him by a gypsy named Melquiades and dabbles perseveringly in alchemy. Aureliano, a metalworker who fabricates little fishes out of gold, proclaims himself a Colonel and leads dozens of unsuccessful Liberal revolts against his country's Conservative government. Rebeca, Jose's adopted daughter, arrives at Jose's house carrying the bones of her deceased biological parents in a sack and has a nervous habit of eating dirt. Jose's wife, Ursula, acts as the family's moral backbone and rational center. The history and fate of the members of the Buendia family are prophesied by Melquiades, whose cryptic parchments are left after his death for one of Jose's descendants to decipher. Also documented is Macondo's growth from a primitive village to a town thriving with commerce (including an ill-fated banana company), entertainment, and the latest technology. This is truly one of the best novels I have ever read. It transcends its time and place by virtue of being mythical and universal. The last paragraph in particular is incredibly profound and seems to summarize not only the novel but mankind's existence; consider how it relates to religious concepts of creation, destruction, and human sin. Few novels offer greater scope, imagination, imagery, or ideas.
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Summary: In Another Time, In Another Place
Review: This book is a spell, 100 years long but its never broken. I've heard the term magic realism a million times but never have heard it defined in any way that includes more than one book at a time. Every Latin American writer is very different. Perhaps the term was useful when the Latin boom occurred(as a way of referring to a new group of writers) but now it seems kind of meaningless. This book is magical though in that everything from natural phenomenon to supernatural phenomenon is told in the same river long sentences and every unlikely thing seems perfectly natural. The realism part is perhaps the fact that Garcia-Marquez is addressing very real issues like History though with a very unreal fable. You can enjoy this as a kind of imaginative feast which takes you into a kind of Midsummer Nights Dream of a world and you can let yourself just let it all flow by and through your mind like a dream some poet is transmitting to you directly which is a highly recommended way of enjoying this, as art. Or you can pay mind to the themes, mostly tragic, that run through this and realize that the reason the author chose to write in such a way was to supply his world with a continuity, a story, that his country did not provide. Any way you read it some of the events told will remain in memory long after the book has been loaned to someone else(the arrival of ice to the village). It is a beautiful book. It seems light while you are reading it but the power of the book builds and builds and the ending is quite remarkable. Easily one of the top ten books of the last fifty years if not one hundred.
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Summary: owner's manual for the human soul
Review: For years most of my life, until I read D. Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," One Hundred Years Of Solitude was the single greatest piece of prose I had ever encountered. Even now it surpasses the truly gigantic I.J. as the most profound of novels. If you are going to read this book don't read it once or even twice, read it over and over again. Garcia Marquez has crafted so many different levels of meaning into the story of one family as to explain the entirety of human history from creation on. This is nothing less than the meaning of life, revealed through the virtues and faults of the Buendia family. The town of Macondo is a experiences everything of importance that has happened in the Americas since they were discovered by europeans. The Buendias are perhaps the most human characters I have ever encountered in literature. The mistakes they are doomed to keep repeating show how where one comes from will always be his destiny. This novel is anything but a crass tear-jerker, but it triggered emotiong in me of increadible power. This is the one book I buy for all my family and friends when it's time to give gift. I could keep going on and on, but you know how strongly I recomend this. My high school spanish teacher, Barbara Brown, gave me one of the greatest gifts I've ever recieved when she turned me on to Garcia Marquez. READ THIS BOOK, then READ IT AGAIN.
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Summary: Among My Most Common Recommendations
Review: As an author with my debut novel in its initial release and an educator in an impoverished border-area high school with a student population usually 99% Latino, I can safely say that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is among the most common book recommendations I make to my most gifted students. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE rests near the top of last century's literary works. It is the perfect example of magical realism, and it practically introduced Latin American literature to the world scene. This book is tops. If you haven't read it, do!
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Summary: The only novel I've been able to read more than once...
Review: .... and I read it everytime I can't find anything else that interests me. It took me four tries to get through it the first time, stick with it. If you can't get it the first time put it down and come back to it in year or two. 15 years and numerous re-reads later the end still sends me reeling.
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Summary: The World Repeating Itself...
Review: The Story of Macondo and the Buendia family. What a wonderful story full of imagination, sorrow, laughter, solitude, and reality in the same time. How the wars changed the mentality of people, change their behavior, traditions, and it makes them lose the respect for any human relation. How the founded city went from being the most simple, and peaceful place, to this horrifying, deserted city that the technologies ran through it, and its own people stopped caring about what's best for it. How being solitary was the response to many answers, how the Buendia men acted to their defeats, to their pleasures, and how far did they go in order to explore what was out there. The story could be slow at times, but the end has its own unique twist that shows how important history is, and how sad it is when we waste time not doing what we always dreamt of. Such a classic worth reading by Marquez, what dreams, deaths, madness, war, and what pressure has this life on us.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent - one of the five best books ever written
Review: This novel is deserving of all the praise and awards heaped on it. It's expertly written and narrated, it's politically explosive, it's imaginative, and it's blending of the real and surreal could only have been done by such a great writer. It's completely and utterly different from any of the "classics" you have ever read. It's modern and a relic at the same time. There surely are dozens of other reviews outlining the plots and characters of the novel, so let this one just recommend it as a must-read and one of the true masterpieces in all aspects of the word.
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