One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Nietzsche spoke of eternal recurrence; Gabriel García Márquez shows us the eternal present.Magical realism has been defined as a literary genre in which extraordinary events are treated as mundane, while ordinary ones are imbued with the supernatural. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" may not be the first in this genre (I’d suggest Joyce’s "Ulysses"), but it was the first to popularize it and add “magical realism” to the vernacular. While synonymous with Latin American literature, there’s plenty from that part of the world that isn’t magical realism at all, while Salman Rushdie, an Iranian, definitely falls within it.García Márquez employs several tropes that emphasize the circularity and repetition of events in Macondo. From the famous first line, he introduces a person or event in the present or the future, then immediately goes back and relates the past events that brought them to that point. This is his preferred method for introducing new characters or situations. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The repetition of characters’ names across the generations is another example, and readers will find themselves thumbing back to the family tree page repeatedly to make sure they’re following which Arcadio or Aureliano is being referred to.The novel’s scope also widens to take its place in García Márquez’ larger œuvre, at one point bringing in the Eréndira character from his short story "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother." He even includes characters from other novelists, mentioning Rocamadour from Julio Cortázar’s "Hopscotch," an appropriate addition given how the novel moves back and forth in time as it progresses relentlessly forward. The energy of the fictional town of Macondo’s beginning, engendered in a murder and a journey across a swamp in search of the sea (although Macondo’s ultimate origin could be said to have arisen out of Sir Francis Drake’s 1586 attack on Riohacha), contrasts with its end in a windstorm after its inhabitants have forgotten the existence of the town’s founders, the Buendía family. This is presaged by an affliction of amnesia at the novel’s beginning, itself preceded by a world “so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” This is just a sampling; a dissertation could be written (and I’m sure some have) of each example of temporal dislocation.One Hundred Years of Solitude was my introduction to Latin American literature in college, and led me on a quest to read everything I could find by García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Amado, among others. Described as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race,” One Hundred Years of Solitude has finally been filmed as a Netflix mini-series. I can only hope that this exposure will lead others to discover what is already a timeless classic.

Excellent, hard to put down, but also hard to follow sometimes, novel. There's also an excellent TV series of this story.

One of my favorite books

Lo compré para mi profesora de inglés y me sorprendió cuando me contó que ya lo había leído. La historia de la familia Buendía conocida mundialmente.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is a novel full of magical realism, and deep dives into themes like solitude and time. The Buendía family is the main focus following through multiple generations in the town of Macondo. One of the things I really appreciated was how Márquez did a great job at keeping my attention throughout the novel. The use of magical realism, where extraordinary events are treated as normal, makes the story’s world feel both possible and impossible. A key example of how Márquez uses magical realism is when Remedios the Beauty’s ascends to heaven. "Remedios the Beauty, with her face raised to the sun, opened her arms and began to rise slowly into the sky, her feet barely touching the ground, and she vanished into the clouds in a flash of light." The supernatural highlights the use of the magical and the normal. Márquez's writing style is beautiful but at some times can be dense. The long detailed sentences while reading were differently interesting but sometimes I found it overwhelming and hard to follow. One of the reasons I found it hard to follow at times was because of the large number of characters, many of whom share similar names. It was easy to get confused about who was who, especially as the generations passed. all the men in the family have similar names, which makes sense since they are from the same family. But this made it difficult for me personally to remember who was who. Another challenge was understanding the timeline. Márquez often used vague references like “a couple of years later,” which made it hard to know how much time has passed. A theme that stands out is the idea of repetition. The Buendía family keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. While I understood that this was meant to highlight the inevitability of history, it did feel repetitive at times which made it harder for me to stay following during certain parts of the story. The repetition of certain events and patterns across generations also contributed to the feeling of being overwhelmed by the story’s structure.