PENGUIN One Hundred Years of Solitude

I would like to request everyone who purchased anything just give a review because including me everyone buy something after reading reviews. Let's talk about book so the book is, I would say interesting, confusing, but hard to understand at once, actually if one understand the Buendia family tree you get the store & also the rise and fall of Macondo.

looks good but HATE the netflix logo on the front cover, the netflix logo wasn’t even on the listing image.

100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE - Gabriel Garcia Marquez There are tragedies, there are comedies, there is drama and there are love stories. And then, there is this classic by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which does not fit into any of these neatly defined categories - and yet it does. It contains all of these and, at the same time, it is so different from and unlike anything you might have read. It is a panoramic saga of the South American village Macondo, situated somewhere in the swamps, narrated through the trials and tribulations of six generations of the Buendia family, with a sweeping canvas over time and space, which is remarkable and breath-taking. The evolution of Macondo from nothingness to becoming a happy village of 300 odd souls where no one dies and then passing through commercialization, enterprise, prostitution, debauchery, incest, maladministration, railways and telegraph, tyranny, wars, deluge and final annihilation at the cruel hands of nature. As the drama unfolds, one comes across unforgettable characters and events – the mysterious Melquíades, the enterprising but eccentric patriarch Jose Arcadio Beundia, the morally upright matriarch Ursula, the clairvoyant Pilar Ternera, the valiant Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the unfortunate Rebeca, the licentious Petra Cotes, the vain Fernanda, the beauteous Remedios the Beauty, the tragic Meme, the gluttonous Aureliano Sugondo, the stubborn Amaranta, the hopelessly romantic Pietro Crespi and many more (The only confusing element is the repetition of same names across generations, a bit like George W. Bush Sr. and George W. Bush Jr.. Thus, we have several Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios and Remedios'). That minor inconvenience not withstanding, the novel is infused with elements of superstition and paranormal in a way that Shakespeare would have been proud of. And yet, everything is believable. The annihilation of Macondo is almost inevitable from the beginning – like a Sophoclean Tragedy - but it is not so straightforward. All the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle must fit for that to happen which they do, exactly as prophesized by Melquíades and deciphered by Aureliano Babilonia as it is happening all around him. Everything seems real and yet nothing is real at the same time. Perhaps, the author himself sums it up beautifully in the words of the Wise Catalonian: “The past was a lie, memory has no return, every spring gone by could never be recovered, and the wildest and most tenacious love is an ephemeral truth in the end.” I would recommend this book to all lovers of good literature. It is as good as it gets.

I don't have a lot to say except I felt like I was a member of the Buendia family myself by the time I finished reading this. Genuinely difficult to put down.

Es un regalo para mi hija que ya tiene esta obra en español, cómo en una entrevista Gabriel García Márquez dijo que había quedado muy satisfecho con la versión en inglés, pues me parece excelente obsequio para una lectora bilingüe.

Some say, some books, you should never read again in later life. I’ve heard it said, for instance, that having enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye when one was seventeen, that it is a mistake to return to it in middle or later years. Thomas Mann prescribes the reading of his The Magic Mountain, “not once, but twice” – though omits to specify any interval. Having just finished reading ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I feel that this is a novel that one could beneficially revisit several times throughout one’s lifetime – say every two decades? And that’s quite a numerically reasonable suggestion because if - as at least two of the many characters in this narrative do – you live to the age of one hundred, that’s only five reads in a lifetime. For me however, there’s a snag. Somehow, when this novel was published and I was seventeen, I slipped through the net of readership, this is my first reading, and now at the age of seventy-three – according to my own perhaps rashly-prepared gospel – quite possibly it will be my only reading! A shame, because this is one of the richest, most dense, detailed, dreamlike, formalist, symbolic, mysterious, magical, funny - I had some good laughs, and some nightmares! – pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Painting equivalents? The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, Guernica, The Persistence of Memory might give one some idea of the level of detail – not necessarily content – one’s in for. There are twenty-four main protagonists agonising over seven generations of the BUENDIA family in this intense stylish saga which more or less coincides with the crackly political and social history of Colombia between the years 1820 and 1920. Unsurprisingly the plot is baffling. Its weave is not unlike that of a Wilton carpet, so instead of 'U' shaped yarns, the fibre is woven all the way through the carpet and then sheared to create a range of cut and loop textures. Every so often characters pop up to the surface, having travelled invisibly under the substrate for scores of pages, and years. Sometimes without any apparent explanation, build or lead in. The reader might be forgiven in thinking that s/he had one foot in a William Burroughs cut-and-paste text and the other in a David Bowie lyric. It might cause annoyance to a convergent thinker, but just relax and enjoy passages such as; ‘when he asked for the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen on this earth, all the women brought him their daughters. He became lost in misty byways, in figures reserved for oblivion, in the labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one’s thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages.’ But there’s much more than the apparently ‘cut-and-paste’ plot. Here are just some of the themes and symbols which go fuguing away throughout the narrative; gold, ice, buried treasure, death – particularly by firing squad, the death of birds flying into things, incest, the invisibility of people, cannibalism, and of course solitude. There are curious repeat mentions of anointings, lye, chamber pots, small candy animals, gypsies, macaws, small golden fishes, the drawing of chalk circles, begonias and the requirement – or not, a political reference – to paint one’s house either blue or red. So, I leave you with a few further almost edible Marquezian phrases; ‘more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his,’ or ‘solitude had made a selection in her memory, and had burned the nostalgic piles of dimming waste that life had accumulated in her heart,’ or how about, ‘the journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem’? But perhaps we should attribute at least some of this tickly prose to Gregory Rabassa his translator?