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Summary: A Sea of Latino Enchantment
Review: I have read this extraordinary book in Rabassa's excellent translation...and now wil read it in Spanish to compare....like many others, the book took several attempts on my part to make it through...but once I did, I was drawn into a world that seemed to breathe outside of town and yet not so far from our reality...here the world is seen with eyes outside of linear time. beholding things such as ice for the first time.. you will find even eferences to the Ascension with Remedios the Beauty rising upward lost beyond the reaches of the birds of memory...or the plague of insomnia, with forgetfulness and reality slipping away with the meaning of words...here you will find passions celebrated among butterflies and scorpions...it is epic, full of revolutions, passions, discoveries, magic, all flowing from the banana town whose solitude was to be wiped by the winds....
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Summary: Absurdities told with a straight face
Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's voice in this book echoes like a grandfather's telling fantastic tales like they were straight from a history book. If I were to deliver the same words I would not be able to stop my face muscles from twitching or my eyes from rapidly blinking... For how does one keep a straight face while talking about a ghost that conducts itself like a normal person, a patriarch tied by his family to a tree for years, a massacre of townspeople that nobody saw, a tangle of depressing secret relationships a few of them incestuous? That is the secret of Garcia Marquez's amazing skill.This book is not all roller coaster and nothing else. The evil in it is chilling, the ignorance frustrating, the wisdom mysterious yet magical, and the love--misdirected, undeserved--is searing. The end struck me speechless, I wanted to throw the book for overwhelming me so. Everything comes around in a circle. And time passes and people forget. That's what echoed in my mind after the smoke cleared.
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Summary: Spur of the moment decision
Review: I ordered this book on whim, and ended up absolutely loving it. I found the characters, especially the women, to be bold and well developed, a true example of latin writings abilbity to see beyond gender lines and write true characters. Definitely should be required reading for anyone who has ever had difficult family or social issues. So, basically everyone.
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Summary: Simply Amazing
Review: Some books I recommend because I enjoyed them, or thought they were funny. Others are works of art, crafted by a genius mind. I give you Gabriel Garcia Maquez and his 100 Years of Solitude, an etheral, dreamlike story of the founding family of a small town lost in the jungles of Columbia. Often comic and surreal, but strangely believable at the same time, this Nobel Prize winning book is inexplicably brilliant. Totally blew my mind! Don't miss it.
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Summary: The best book ever
Review: I started reading this book in 1981 but I failed several times, about 7 years later when I took some courses in Latin American history and only then I could read this book from the beginning to the end. Since then this book has been number one for me and nothing has come close to it. I also loved No One Writes to the Colonel by the same author. The interesting thing is that I tried to read One hundred Years .. again a couple of times but I couldn't get through , so maybe this book has magical powers and calls upon its readers if it finds them ready.
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Summary: Entertaining in short doses, funny in observation of people, hard work
Review: I enjoyed it mostly although it was hard going. I'm not sure what it was about except I think it was partly about how we can live very close to other people and still not understand each other at all. This was a group of people leading lives of solitude although they were supposed to be family and community. I grew to like the weirdness like the ghosts, and the bizarre happenings. I think the author was writing as if what goes on in your own head was actually real. The cover said it was enthralling - I did not think so. It also said it was supernatural, magical which it was.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Ever
Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, it is THE masterpiece of the twentieth century. Years from now, this book will (and rightfully so) be required reading for your children and grandchildren, and generations afterwards. My advice to you, the wary shopper, is to order this book or buy it IMMEDIATELY. If you consider yourself a mature reader (as I do), you should get this book and grow. I should only be so lucky as to have never read it, so I could experience it again for the first time. If you've started it and don't really know where it's going, FINISH IT. It is the best ending ever written, in my humble opinion, and would certainly be a contender for the best novel ever published period. Read it, and whether or not you finish it, pass it on. There is much to be learned here, if you are willing to learn it. And to those who can't finish it-- stick with it. To those who finished it and still didn't like it-- try again a few years down the road. You will discover a whole universe in those pages. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, like Toni Morrison, did not win the Nobel for no good reason. Find that reason and cherish it.
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Summary: One of the best books ever written!
Review: This is the second book that I have read by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and I absolutly loved it! I was board one day and picked it up to read. I finished it in three days but will remember it for the rest of my life! This book truly made Garcia-Marquez my favorite author! I went all the way through college without reading it, but I suggest everybody read it at least once! I also reccommend "Chronicle of a Death Fortold." Its words, too, hold all of the power and magic that grip you tightly as you can't wait to read the next page!
Rating:
Summary: unforgettable
Review: The copy I have of One Hundred Years of Solitude had been passed between backpackers in Europe in 1994. Each person read it and passed it on to someone else at the next hostel they arrived at. It is dog-eared and falling apart but its world trip ended with me as I just couldn't pass it on... I was told by the man who passed it on to me that it was the best book he had ever read and he wanted to share the gift. I agree - but I'm too selfish to share and will read it over and over until it turns to dust
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Summary: You must read this book!
Review: This was my first encounter with the magical realism style and I love it! The Buendia family is quite possibly the most intriguing I have encountered in any book. A must read.
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