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| Picture Credit - TV Line |
Maybe we read some celebrated literary works the way we eat kale or broccoli—you don’t exactly love it but they say it’s, like, a super food. Not so Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Once you start reading this novel, you can't stop. It is a real page-turner and a book actually capable of being an amazing Soap Opera. It is of course one of the supreme achievements in literature.
Introduction
Book’s Name - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author’s Name - Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez
Genre - Novel, Magical Realism
Language - Spanish, English
Synopsis - Spoiler Alert!
This is the author’s epic tale of seven generations of the Buendia family that also spans a hundred years of turbulent Latin American history, from the postcolonial 1820s to the 1920s.
Patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendía builds the Utopian city of Macondo in the middle of a swamp. At first prosperous, the town attracts Gypsies and hucksters—among them the old writer Melquiades, a stand-in for the author.
A typical storm lasting nearly five years almost destroys the town, and by the fifth Buendía generation, its physical decrepitude is matched by the family’s depravity. A hurricane finally erases all traces of the city.
By the end of the novel, Melquiades has been revealed as the narrator; his mysterious manuscripts are in fact the text of the novel.
About the Author
Gabriel Garcìa Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, affectionately known as Gabito through Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International prize for literature and the 1982 Nobel prize in literature.
He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. He died in 2014, with the president calling him the ‘greatest Colombian who ever lived'.
About the Book
One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendian Family over seven generations. This book, with its lush, detailed sentences, a large cast of characters, and tangled narrative, One Hundred Years of Solitude is definitely not an easy book to read.
It is however a deeply rewarding one, with an epic assortment of intense romances, civil war, political intrigue, globe-trotting adventure, and many, many characters. With the city of Macondo to storm destroying it, the rise and fall of the Buendían family, the book has many layers of meaning which are inexhaustible. The political reality with magical realism really grasps the story in making it a dense masterpiece.
Theme Involved
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a dense book where mysteries are spent out of nothing. The supernatural and the surreal suffuse each page, raising even mundane encounters to a mythic dimension, staging history as timeless drama, played out over and over again through each generation.
In each repetition, fantastic and fatal changes also produce a sense of history. Such a phenomenon within the fictional village of Macondo intertwines seamlessly with events taking place in the real country of Colombia. Its characters grow and die, only to be reincarnated or return as ghosts.
It produces a sense of history as a downward spiral the character seems powerless to escape. Beneath the magic is a story about the pattern of Colombian and Latin American history from colonial times onward. It also held hope by affirming the possibility of building a better world.
Famous Quotes
“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
The Bottom Line
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book definitely where Marquez contained all of that life in one extraordinary novel. There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it. So, it's definitely a must-read that shows Latin American history and a wonderful story.
My rating for this book - 4 on 5
You can buy a copy of this book - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Written By - Ashish Joshi
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