Thursday - January 15, 2009

One Hundred Years of Solitude

**** One Hundred Years of Solitude  by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author) and Gregory Rabassa (Translator) - (paperback translation 2006, original Spanish version 1967).

I bought this book primarily because of the following editorial blip on the back cover by William Kennedy of the New York Times Book Review: "The first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."  

The gist of the story, lifted from Amazon: "One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction."

Wikipedia notes that "Critics often cite certain works by García Márquez, such as "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as exemplary of magical realism, a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary."

All that being said, this was one bizarre book with a royal family of the freakiest people ever.  A hundred years is a lot to keep track of, so unless you're a fast reader, read it when you can plow right through the whole thing (not as little tidbits to go to sleep by for a month or two, as most of my reading goes.)  Marquez masterfully plays with reality and humanity and truth and love and honor and religion and time and, did I say reality? 

I will say, however, that as confused as I was meandering through the story, it sucked me in so completely that I totally knew the ending before it came, and in a twisted way I enjoyed it every bit as much as I suspected I would.