One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Summary: Completely unbelievable! The stark realness is captivating!
Review: Obviously Garcia-Marquez's best work, 100 Years shouts the isolation and uncertainty felt by the myriad high schoolers and collegiates poring over the masterpiece in effort to find one's self.A classic testiment to the Quasi-Modern era in which Gabriel attempts to survive. Macondo has become a second home to lonely young and women throughout the world

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Summary: THIS BOOK IS THE BEST OF ALL!!!
Review: this is most fanstastic book I've have ever read ( I've read a lot!!!) This is the book that everyone should read. Gabo must live forever

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Summary: magic from beginning to end
Review: 100 years of a story that has already been told and that is yet to happen. Magic is heard, seen and touched through the lively descriptions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One is surely going to get goosebumps by the end of this timeless narration. It is a saga of solitude, of desperation, but still a story of power, love, failure and fate. A book you will not read, you will devour..

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Summary: Sowa's review of the best novel of the past 50 years
Review: If readers want to read one novel that is the likely choice as Novel of the 20th Century (ludicrous thought as that seems), I strongly recommend ``One Hundred Years of Solitude'' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Great fiction removes our usual methods of perceiving the world, bringing us a revised code of insight, understanding and comprehension. This novel has that transformative quality. The English translation from the original Spanish by Gregory Rabassa is also, in its own right, a classic of its kind. What readers want _ human insight, distilled reflection on the patterns of history, careful language _ are delivered in a magical, powerful way in this book. I have to add, personally, that this novel can be offputting at first. It took me 70 pages before the hook in my brain was completely set. From that point on, I was addicted to Marquez's prose. I'm about to read the book for the third time this spring.

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Summary: Wow.
Review: A multi-sensory experience from print is hard to believe. Hair stood up on my body. Tears flowed, and my mind raced in wonder. Who is this magician? How has he learned these things? How have his words affected me so? It's also like eating rich food; a torte, shellfish. Something wonderful to be savored slowly, in small bites. It's easy to be overwhelmed by this book. I want to be buried with this book. I can't believe it's out of print.

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Summary: Its greatness passed me by
Review: I was given this book by a friend so I felt obliged to finish it. I realised early on that I was not going to enjoy it but I still hoped that it might be possible to admire it. About half way through, when the vestiges of a plot petered out, and with the appearance of another generation of individuals with the same name as the last and with equally unfathomable motivations, I resigned myself to the fact that the novel's greatness was passing me by.

In hoping for believable characters in whose fate the reader might summon up some interest I am probably displaying a prejudice about literature. While I concede that there are a few flashes of brilliant imagery, these certainly seem a very poor reward for six weeks of reading time. However this does not altogether explain the hostility I began to feel towards the novel. Underlying the pretentious story telling there is, I suspect, a social theory which I find deeply inimical: a more careful reading than I am prepared to give would be needed to confirm this.

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Summary: Exquisite work of magical complexity and infinite beauty!
Review: One hundred years of solitude is a work of genius. Marquez takes us through the lives and times of atleast six generations of Buendia family, weaving one magical imagery over the other, layers and layers of fantasy build into characters and daily reality. The writer is a poet, with his metaphors taking the center stage and creating a marvellous world of miracles and half-truths, of lies that defy several laws of physics and yet are amusing and interesting.

His novel is like a river flowing backwards from the ocean, and likewise he traces the trajectories of all its tributeries, rather mulls over the genesis and fall of each one, and describes all the floods, draughts, tides, swells and ebbs, in an continuous stream of highly imaginative narrative. Maybe my review is written in a rather unoriginal copy of the style of Marquez, and might appear full of long sentences. The same style in hands of this master sees flowering of an amazing piece of literature. It is rich in literary, scientific and philosophical meanderings, its full of several forms of life, each form of life is swamped by the overwhemling current of times, each generation discovers for itself love, lust, intrigue, tastes and temptations, talents and tempests.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez never ceases to amaze me, every sentence is a work of art. The book is sufficiently complex to keep one engrossed for weeks. Most pages are too mindboggling to be handed more than a few at a time. He supplies your imagination with so much matter that you can almost sense your brain cells seething with creativity or to say the least a pleasant confusion and agitation. The book is full of mysteries and laughter, massacres and births, people who have same names, flying carpets, Sanskrit, alchemists, wars, women who live to hundred years of age, bastards, failed and flourished businesses, and every imaginable occupation that can be thought of in a small time AND MUCH MUCH MORE. Read it!

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Summary: interesting wordsmith
Review: starts interesting but stream of consciousness gets old
and range of players is limited.

yes unique literature but not that satisfying.
ANd thats what I felt.
If I dont skim a book so I do drink in all its flavors, then that is a good novel.
Do we write jsut for the literati? or anyman?

TO whom are we trying to convey some of life?

Do I need to repeat the same atmospehre over and over?
Should I marvel in how they show stupidity or comic relief?


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Summary: BEST ENDING EVER!
Review: No, the story doesn't exactly have a plot, but more of a collection of fantastic stories of each member of a large family through generations. Each character has their own obsession, problem, passion, or insanity. You get to follow generations through almost supernatural events. All the while there is something much bigger happening, and Marquez succeeds in bringing it all together beautifully in the end. This book has the best ending I have ever read that left me absolutely awestruck and weeping as I was devastated that the adventure was over.


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Summary: Many Years Later
Review: I loved this piece of literature. I have to call it literature bacause not many novels reach the high standards of creativity, sensitivity, knowledge, bewilderment, enlightenment, spiritualism, fantasy, historical significance etc., etc. The essence of what goes around comes around is an important ingredient in life, and that is what this book is about; the times of life that reinvent itself and are circuitous. This story of the Buendia family could have been the story of the Kiev family in Russia, or the Blem family in Norway, or the chen family in China; it's a universal story, that is timeless and important to those who love and want to be loved in return.