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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 863
EAN: 9780060929794
ISBN: 0060929790
Label: Perennial
Manufacturer: Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 464
Publication Date: 1998-11
Publisher: Perennial
Studio: Perennial

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
"Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.

The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting 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 women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."

With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature. --Alix Wilber

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Monumental, Mesmerizing!
Review: Most likely the greatest epic I have ever read. The story grips you, pulls you in, and commands 100% of your concentration. Marquez deserves two Nobel Prizes for this tale.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: dazzling panorama of life & death, love & loss, energy & dissipation
Review: I first read this 33 years ago, while in college, and was utterly wowed at the sweep of these stories, all interlinked yet standing on their own. I was studying the classics - and in particular, oral history - so this was doubly fascinating as a streaming narrative of magical realism.

Having re-read it for the first time, I was again astonished at the life and complexity on every page: you laugh, you weep, you hope, and you judge. The details are woven in with the greatest mastery, and stick in the reader's mind long after the book is finished. My favorite image is the ice scene, which became a touchstone in my memory 33 years ago. The story throbs with life you can enter, while remaining unbelievable. It is as good as any mythology and so much of it remains unexplained.

The structure of the narrative is essentially circles within circles: there is a powerful founder (who can pull a horse down by its ears) who founds a city; he is an inspired man and leader, who degenerates yet still controls or sets in motion everything that happens over the next 100 years. The variations in the family are fabulously well portrayed, as they superimpose themselves back on eachother in endless patterns of repetition - skill, intelligence, beauty, political conviction are not enough to break out of the essential pattern. The only thing that will precipitate an end is to reach the end of the largest circle, which is related to the Sanskrit manuscripts written by the greatest friend of the founder, a mysterious gypsy.

What makes the whole thing work is the characters, who are wonderfully succinct and pass through a hundred years as naturally as the cycle of plants. While some readers hate this, I found it utterly charming and exotic, yet chillingly psychologically real. Even with ghosts and miracles.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. The work is so rich and experimental that it is unclassifiable. It made me feel wonder all over again, even in middle age. I would posit that this is a work of genius. Warmly recommended.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Another off the list of "to be read sometime".
Review: I can add little to that from other reviewers, except I hate to see an author built up too much for just being "different". This book would have been much more accessible to readers had he not been quite so inventive (or cute). Just because you can do something is not a reason to go ahead and do it. The story and the style would not have suffered by a little less "magical" and a little more "realism". It's one thing to make the readers have to work some and another to deliberately make things more confusing than needed (re: keeping track of the characters).

Did I really, really enjoy it? No, but it was a very interesting read and I am glad I read it.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Solitude is Life
Review: There has been renewed interest in the work of the Nobel Prize winning Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The keystone of his work is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" originally published in 1967. A reissue edition of the novel published in 2003 by Harper Collins and translated by Gregory Rabassa tells the story of several generations of residents of the fictional town "Macondo." Like the South American macondo tree, the people of the town have roots both in and above the earth. In simple declarative sentences, a style he learned from his mother's oral histories of her family, Marquez describes every aspect of the lives of the people from birth to death and beyond. Macondo lies in solitude between the mountains and the sea, and the several generations of characters mirror that solitude in their personal understanding of the world. Idiosyncracy and passion are common denominators in the diverse characters who are all full of life but respectful of death. The reader quickly enters the story by learning to abandon the traditional sense of time, space, and social structure. Then Marquez takes the believer on a marvelous conscious and unconscious journey through the human condition.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Best Book Ever Written!
Review: What can I say about the best book I have ever read? Fabulous characters, based on Garcia Marquez's memories of his childhood, and magical realism. Once you have read this book, you will never, ever forget it! Since I have read "Solitude" I have also devoured Marquez's other books, in particular, "Love in the Time of Cholera" which is the most beautiful love story ever written. I now have most if not all of "Gaby's" books, most of which I have purchased through Amazon. He is really and truly the greatest!

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