One Hundred Years of Solitude

Rating:
Summary: Achingly beautiful
Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the type of book that once you finish reading, you will want to buy a copy for everyone you know. This tremendous novel is so pressed with humanity that you will suspect that every person you know will be able to relate to some aspect of it. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of the Buendia family, a dynasty that inhabits the mythical village of Macondo for ten decades until the last of their line breathes his last breath. The cast of characters continually changes as new Buendias are born, grow up and die. Mr. Marquez invents a singular, mystical air for each of his characters, charging each of their tales with enchantment, wonderment and meaning. In the span of their existences, some of the family seek love, others solitude; some serenity, others uprising; some industry, others intimacy. Regardless of his or her life's pursuit, each member of this family is absolutely unforgettable and very easy to sympathize with. Some novels incorporate a tremendous range of the uniformly important aspects of life. This is certainly one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Hoping it will get better
Review: I heard about this book at roughly the same time from several independent sources and I took it as a sign that I must read it. I'm at page 200, and I'm still awaiting the brilliance and genius that it's supposed to embody.

The repetition of family names is confusing. The plot, if there is a definite one, is somewhat stream-of-consciousness, which makes it difficult to follow at times. I understand the magical realism concept, but I'm not that charmed with it. The characters are vividly described, both on the outside and inside, but I've felt no real attachment to any of them. They feel more like caricatures than real people. Maybe I'm just not getting the book or its message. (What is the message?) I think it may be about how government and modernism can corrupt a simple people. But it's difficult to be sure, as it's disguised among the thickness of surrealism, incest, suicide, and murder. The incestuous scenes abound and were a shock to me. Why so much incest? Perhaps I'm failing to grasp the unique Latin-American culture this book is supposed to have captured so perfectly. I will say that Garcia Marquez certainly has an original writing style, and I have gotten a kick out of some of his creative metaphors.

Otherwise, I'm having a hard time staying with the book, but in fairness I will read it all the way through . However, it has not been a page-turner thus far.

Rating:
Summary: Well done and enjoyable but somewhat disappointing
Review: I had heard from many people whose opinions I respected that this was a great book. I had high expectations and many of them, though not all, were met.

Its use of magical realism is engaging as the reader follows the lives, loves and tragedies of the Buendia family over what seems to be the entire course of human history. The book covered a tremendous emotional range as well: funny, sweet, tragic, romantic, sexy, stupid, mundane, brilliant and more. The details of such extremes lent the story truth in spite of its mystical elements.

What disappointed me was the lack of emotional connection to any of the characters. Their experiences, though exaggerated, were universal. Yet the characters never quite felt real in spite of being complex and dynamic.

I recognize that it is a richly textured and well-written work, yet I was not moved to love it, and in that I found disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: A Strange and Beautiful Book...
Review: This is one of the strangest and most powerful books I have ever read. I usually read European classics but had read "Love in the Time of Cholera" years ago and decided to try Garcia Marquez again. I can honestly say that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is by far the most miraculously incredible, fast-paced, confusing, and magical novel I have ever read. I wasn't sad when it ended, because it simply HAD to end where it did; Garcia Marquez has a perfect sense of time.

You find things in this novel that you simply cannot find if you're tied to the European tradition like I am (was). People who live to be 144. Rain that lasts over four years. Women so beautiful they cause death. A man whose presence is marked by swarms of yellow butterflies. People taken up to heaven. An "immaculate" suicide. These things happen all the time in this book, and the remarkable thing is that, for Garcia Marquez, they are perfectly unremarkable. They are an integral, wholly normal part of the world of his imagination, and the reader is fully engrossed in that world until the very last page.

My one piece of advice for those wishing to read this book: read slowly, even when the pace of the plot begs you to flip the page. Things happen suddenly in this book -- people die in a sentence and are reborn in the next. The paragraphs are usually long, but they contain thousands of literary treasures you will miss if you blink.

This is a book I will not soon forget.

Rating:
Summary: Latin America in 350 pages or less
Review: It may seem like a glib comparisson, but really 100 years of solitude is a lot like a Latin American literary version of the Simpsons. The book is deliciously fast pased. Like a good Simpsons episode it's jam-packed with bizarre events, so many they jump at you almost faster than you can take them all in. Just like you can watch a Simpsons two or three times and always find something new that had escaped you the first time, you can read Solitude many times over and it's always seems fresh, there's always something new waiting for you there that you'd missed the first time around in the great storm of occurrances.

Just like the Simpsons paints a disturbingly true-to-life picture of contemporary American life, Solitude is a great running allegory of Latin America. No single element of it can be described as realistic, but the overall effect is a remarkably lifelike feel for the cultural feel of the region. Of course, everyone knows that no Nuclear Plant worker is as incompetent as Homer, but the caricature of his incompetence captures a facet of American tolerance for mediocrity we can all recognize, and does it far more effectively than a more direct representation could have. No one in Latin America can eat 8 cows in a 4 day binge like one of the Aurelianos does, but the way the scene is written gives you a sense for a specifically Latin American attitude towards the Feast that is both factually wrong and metaphorically perfect.

Also, the book is just as much fun as a good Simpsons episode. Like the real master that he is, Garcia Marquez won't make you choose between great art and great entertainment: here, you get both.

The only part where the metaphor really breaks down is that Garcia Marquez explores melancholy, bitterness, and just plain sadness in a way that American prime time TV could never get away with. There's a deeply human quality to the suffering, the solitude of most of characters in the book that's never watered down, and it's intersperced with the scenes of great joy rather than canceled out by them.

Rating:
Summary: great translation
Review: gregory rabassa's translation of this book is a great work in itself; i'm no scholar, but to me, his work seems the spiritual descendent of putnam's, just as the story itself is of don quixote. man, i wish i could read spanish - could you imagine having to read translations of shakespeare?

Rating:
Summary: What the book meant to me.
Review: I believe that One Hundred Years Of Solitude is one of the greatest novels of all time. I believe this for a number of reasons that I will show with this review. I have never felt entirely comfortable talking about this book, I always tell my self I should read it again. But the first time I read it, it changed my life. It meant something very special to me, maybe the rest of the world did not see this in the book, but here is what it meant to me.
When I read the book I did not know anything about Magical Realism so when I read the parts with them I was a bit confused. And later I realized what they were. Marquez's writing is very beautiful and poetic. Every book written by a Spanish writer since Solitude has been compared to it, even ones that have nothing to do with it! Just because this book made such a huge impact on peoples lives and was very original. The book certainly made an impact on my life and what I understood from the book is something I hope others understood as well.
I think that the meaning of this book is repetition, repetition in family, country and everything else. We go around repeating ourselves over and over again, and we all come to the same and from the same beginnings when it's all over. The reason this book had such an impact on my life was because if I had not read it I might of repeated my families mistakes (god knows there are many). I wish to tell people that this is a book to be read by YOUNG people around the world, the further you get in your life the harder it is to change. Some of us repeat our family's mistakes without even knowing, be careful, don't repeat. The book meant many different things to other people of course, but this is ONE of the things the book meant to me, and I urge everyone to read it, I believe it is one of those books that should be required reading for the human race.

Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: This novel traces the stories of a family over the course of one hundred years. I very much enjoyed this book for a number of reasons. One was that it was an easy read, with challenging vocabulary, but not so challenging that it detracted from the tale at hand. The characters, though exaggerated, were exceptionally realistic in that their actions were true to human nature. What I did not like about this book was that it was a little too graphic (every romance included a description of the carnal relationship between the people) and that it was almost terse. The novel boasts over 300 pages, however, each individual story felt clipped, especially at the end. Nonetheless, I very much enjoyed this book, and recomend it to anyone willing to read late in to the night.

Rating:
Summary: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Review: This book has an amazing story. The story is simple, yet difficult. The town and the people seem so alive and real. I could see what was going on and felt what the characters were going through. It is very detailed and written in an absolutely breathtaking manner. Anyone loving magical realism will surely like this book.

Rating:
Summary: Yes indeed.
Review: I have not read a book as good as One Hundred Years of Solitude in a long while. It's hard to say what, exactly, pulled me in so much. One could make the argument that there are too many characters for the reader to really get inside the head of any one of them, or that none are "three-dimensional," whatever that means. But I don't think that is at all the case. The accusations of "two-dimensionality" are based on the fact that many of these characters have one action which defines their entire lives, which they follow and live with for the rest of same. I, personally, find that sort of depiction to be extremely true to human nature, as I also find the irrationality of many of these actions to be. At the end of the book, I felt like I understood some of the characters better than the author, and that others I didn't understand at all. I think that this is the reaction most people have, and that it was Marquez's intention that it should be so. (A note: my personal favourites were Colonel Aureliano Buendia and Renata Remedios. You will have yours.)

I also found the much-touted "magical realism" to be captivating. It's not the presence of mysticism that is so wonderful; in fact, generally I don't much care for overt "spirituality" in books. The thing is, Marquez has made it so the mystical elements seem perfectly logical and natural, and require no suspension of disbelief. And that, perhaps, is his most defining element; I've seen it in Autumn of the Patriarch as well. Anyway, read this book today and marvel at the irrational enigmatic creatures that are human beings.