Reviews

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

notthatkat's review against another edition

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emotional reflective relaxing slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

d52s's review against another edition

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1.0

I'd heard so much about this book, so I finally checked it out and could not get into it at all. The huge, rambling paragraph blocks were a chore to read. I pushed myself to around page 50, hoping it would turn around, but it was just too rambling and tiresome.

curatoriasol's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

raaaaaaaach's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

alejandradc18's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional funny mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

tcleary98's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

A mad, roving epic masterpiece that has it all. 

At first, you’ll probably be frustrated by the repetition of names. I found it maddeningly confusing. My memory is sufficiently turbid without attempting to juggle 22 separate Aurelianos. But there is method to the madness. The repetition is symptom and symbol of the story’s primary themes: the non-linearity of time (and of progress); nostalgia; fatalism; insular elitism; and egoism.

The technique of repetition is often used when skipping ahead in time (“Years later…”), merging the past and future, and revealing both to be predetermined. The naming itself is a form of fatalism: the child is destined to display the same traits as his/her namesakes and therefore repeat their mistakes. Just as the entire Buendía family is revealed to have been doomed from the outset in Melquíades’ prophecy, each Buendía child is doomed from the moment of their christening.

The circularity of time revealed in the manner and actions of the Buendías heightens the propensity for nostalgia. Nostalgia, however, is shown to be an isolating poison. Time can leap back and forth, but one cannot leap back and forth in time - there is no return, only memory which divorces the dreamer from the present and reality.

On the flip side, the repeated mistakes and the merging of history with myth evince the ease with which the oppressive weight of the past can be shrugged off and forgotten. The progress of one generation can be swiftly lost by the next.

The Buendía dynasty begins with a first great fear born of incest - the pig-tailed child - and ends with that same fear realised. Across the generations, nothing has been learnt.

The narrow pool of names (and genes) also indicates an isolating culture of self-love on both an individual and familial level (represented by various incestuous episodes).

The town of Macondo is isolated from the world. Even when the world comes to Macondo it separates itself with an impenetrable fence. Attempts to connect Macondo to the outside world are either frustrated or calamitous. This reflects the Buendías, the solipsistic founding family. Each is interested only in their own desires or, at most, those of the family. The Buendías become ever more solitary as the generations pass, living together almost as strangers. Alienation is the least of the damaging consequences of selfish introspection.

There is a tension throughout between the contradictory desires to modernise without changing. This stance is somewhat validated by the colonial and capitalist forms of progress that beset and besiege the town. The tension also reflects the contradictory aims of a founding family that simultaneously wish to ameliorate their creation whilst retaining their position.

There are hints that love may be the answer to egoism. The love of Petra Cotes leads to selfless charity and the final pig-child producing love destroyed a town so decayed that it must be seen as a merciful cleansing. Yet the incestuous nature of this final love also suggests that the Buendías‘ navel-gazing is a pernicious and self-destructive force.

Speaking of sex, there’s plenty of it - as there should be in any compendium of human nature - and of every stripe: child sex, prostitution, incest, rape, there may even have been a moment of beastiality.

Lust, like the Buendías‘ many other vices, stands in opposition to the castrated spectre of Catholicism that looms over the town. The superstitions of earlier generations are gradually replaced with religious rites. The magical increasingly overlaps with the religious. The magical realist style thereby undermines the religious elements by portraying them as extensions of mythical thinking.

The novel starts with a patch of uninhabited Colombian jungle, it sees the growth of a prosperous town, war, exploitation, religion, science, love, magic and myth, before reverting to terra incognita - what more could one want?

annemariedonnelly003's review against another edition

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5.0

Reading this book felt like climbing a mountain. The view at the top was glorious.

noella_t's review against another edition

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4.0

I'm sure there are others who appreciate this book much more than I did - not sure what that says about me though. I've read that if you re-read it you'll find stuff you missed the first time. But there's too many other books out there I want to read first.

I loved the reviews of others - tells me I'm not alone.

Of course when I tell people I've read the book it'll make me sound smart. I know I'm smart because I figured out that it's 417 pages of people with two or three of the same names doing the same thing over and over and over again. This 100 years could have happened in the first 100 pages and several trees could have been saved.

mellymc's review against another edition

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1.0

The only reason I finished this is because it was a Book Club choice, otherwise I would have DNFd it soon after starting. There is no character development, not helped by the fact that the majority of the characters share the same names so you're never quite sure to whom the author is referring, and the never-ending paragraphs jump from one random event to another without a continuous thread to keep hold of. The women in the book are mainly seen as vessels for sex (more accurately in a lot of cases rape), often underage and/or incestuous, or they're merely described as a joke/nuisance. The men are either wastrels; seeking some form of glory not even they understand; or indulging in their obsessive 'love' for their mother/sister/aunt while being portrayed as the embodiment of masculinity. The language could have been interpreted as beautiful if the subject matter wasn't so poor.

souljaleonn's review against another edition

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challenging reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix

4.25