One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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Book Reviews of One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
Book Review: A book that offers hundred reasons for you to read
Summary: 5 Stars
Oftentimes, lengthy and detailed novels suffer from boring plots. But ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is anything but boring. Once you opened it, you will become unaware of the time reading it. This book offers hundred reasons for you to wish it will not end. However, due to my incompetence to capture the thought of the genius behind this book, I can only give you a few of those reasons.
1. Characters are vividly described. Each was carefully introduced by Garcia-Marquez in a way unforgettable to the reader--Real emotions, distinct personalities, and unique but intertwined experiences.
2. Garcia Marquez tried to create a storyline of impossibilities to be unexpectedly believable. Myths, taboos and sins are included. But instead of defeating the popularity of the novel, those factors added spice, magic and uniqueness. Never this novel will fall under mediocrity.
3. The author was able to give a balance in describing human and natural aspects. He succeeded in creating a psychological standpoint of his own and polishing this aspect using environmental descriptions. You will encounter statements digging to the mind and heart of the character. On the other hand, you will be impressed by the details he gave to the setting wherein the characters are amazingly connected with. For example, he gave a detailed description of the Buendia's house and at the same time captured the happenings of its dwellers.
4. Symbols are proliferated in the novel. Through this, Garcia-Marquez gave the readers an opportunity to explore the story themselves, to think what caused this to happen and what happens next.
5. The story is a web of emotions. It is like a roller-coaster ride of feelings (sadness, excitement, love, discoveries, happiness, and extreme solitude).
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is surely a novel worth the Nobel Prize. It was able to capture hundred years of the lives of the Buendia family and is now sharing it to millions of readers of our time.
Book Review: Easily among the best I've read so far
Summary: 5 Stars
This work can only be the product of a mind in an extremely imaginative state. Gabriel Marquez blends the real and the surreal to weave a fantastic tale around the town of Macondo and the Buendia family starting with Jose Arcadio Buendia, the patriarch characterized by his entrepreneurial zeal and scientific spirit who, among other explorations, attempts to use a daguerreotype to disprove the existence of God and all the way to Aureliano who is finally seen deciphering parchments. In between you will find numerous Aurelianos and Arcadios all of which can get pretty confusing; to keep track of them all, fortunately, the book has the Buendia family tree printed at the beginning. Actually, unless you are very good with names and names that you don't hear often, you may want to write down the additional characters in there. Heck, even the teacher Melchor Escalona had the same problem "...used to knowing Jose Arcadio Segundo by his green shirt, went out of his mind when he discovered that the latter was wearing Aureliano Segundo's bracelet and that the other one said, nevertheless, that his name was Aureliano Segundo in spite of the fact that he was wearing the white shirt and the bracelet with Jose Arcadio Segundo's name. From then on he was never sure who was who".
The beautiful aspect of this story is that you are invited to passively sit and watch the events unfold (over a century) in Macondo, a town where, as explained by a poker-faced Gabriel Garcia, flying carpets, yellow butterflies, ascension to heaven are as mundane as the rest. Each moment in Macondo is as good as the next and the beginning is as good as the end and the end is as good as the beginning of the end and the beginning. You are not going to ask "what is next?" since, the way it is told, the beauty of the story lies in the 'here and now'. I don't know how it comes across in Spanish, but I would certainly give credit to Gregory Rabassa for the captivating presentation. Looking forward to reading it again.
Book Review: Terribly frustrating
Summary: 2 Stars
Given the lavish praise for _100 Years of Solitude_, I am gravely disappointed and frustrated. At the risk of being burned in effigy (or in the very least pilloried as a philistine), wading through Marquez was a real test of my patience and literary fortitude.
The story was a difficult read, which I don't mind, so long as there is a reward for my efforts. I found no such relief here. Stylisitically it was an abomination: paragraphs that run one, two, two and a half pages long?! This was worse than Faulkner, as at least with him there is conflict (and resolution) in his writing. In _100 Years of Solitude_, the initial investment of 100 pages is that the following 300 pages are more or less a rehash of the first quarter of the book. The characters have almost identical names, and make many of the same decisions and actions as their namesakes. Beyond being repetitive, I found it mindnumbingly dull. Adding to the sense of drugery I experienced, was the geologic pace of the book.
To be fair to the legions of fans of Marquez, I "get" magical realism - in fact, I enjoyed elements of it here. I also understand his point that history is "cyclical" (although I don't happen to agree with him on this), and that this explains not only the similarities in name but also in behaviour by his characters. A strong case could be made for Jung's "collective memory" in the book, given the actions (and in several cases, literal "hereditary memory") of the many Arcadios and Aurielianos ; heck, I can even see how one could argue that Marquez is showing the existential crisis of the individual - that, in spite of our best efforts, we are all alone, daily wrestling with our solitude. And perhaps it is precisely because of these clues that this is so beloved by so many. All that aside, I didn't enjoy the book at all and had to force myself to return to it again and again in order to finish. With his book, at least, I am puzzled at the high regard with which it is held.
Book Review: Brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
Gabriel García Márquez who has created in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" an enchanted place that does everything but cloy. Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life:
"The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood." This is the language of a poet who knows the earth and does not fear it as the enemy of the dreamer.
Near the end of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" a character finds a parchment manuscript in which the history of his family had been recorded "one hundred years ahead of time" by an old gypsy. The writer "had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant." The narrative is a magician's trick in which memory and prophecy, illusion and reality are mixed and often made to look the same. It is, in short, very much like Márquez's astonishing novel.
This book gives you kind of a feeling of living in a dreamland that is all too real. I highly suggest checking this book out asap
Book Review: Macondo Will Live Forever:
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the unforgettable and favorite books for me has been for many years Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"] (which I believe should be translated as "One Hundred Years of Loneliness") - the marvelously told story of the rise and fall of the Buendia family, their times, their struggles, their curse and damnation - the loneliness that would finally destroy them and the universe that they created and inhabited. The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo; a village founded by José Arcadio and Ursula Buendía and occupied by their descendants with the variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the Buendia women--the two Úrsulas, Amaranta, three Remedios, Fernanda, Rebecca, Santa Sofia de la Piedad, and Pilar Ternera -- the women in the family all have the strong personalities and are "more stubborn than jennets". The genre of the novel is defined as "magic realism" and I can testify that I've never read the book of such magic power, the book which is highly comical and deeply tragic in the same time.
The world that Marquez created is bright and sparkling; the images are vivid and memorable: the flower rain, the yellow butterflies that would always announce Mauricio Babylonia's entrance; the never ending Amaranta's work on her shroud and the letters she would collect from her neighbors to give them to the dead or mysterious rise to Heaven of Remedios the Beauty, the girl who possessed the beauty of such disastrous power that no man in the world could resist it. One afternoon in March, she mysteriously rose to heaven on Brabant sheets and she was "lost forever... in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her."