One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
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."
Is not an easy to read book... if you are looking for light reading, this is not it.The book is hazy and doesn't make sense i often was flipping back to figure out things.Yes, it gets confusing because the same names get used throughout the whole book for different generations in the Buen dia family.
This book tells the story of a little village called Macondo and a family that has been living there since its foundation.
This book worth reading? Yes!... indeed this is a wonderful book. The writing is excellent, the story and its many twists intriguing and it was probably the best ending I've ever read
*Must read more than the first 100 pages to love it.
Read in November 2006
★★★★★
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