Reviews tagging 'Suicidal thoughts'

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

8 reviews

kallsypage's review

challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.0

Whew, what a journey. It was my first time reading this classic. I enjoyed most of it and I appreciate its literacy genius although it can be a bit difficult to read due to some of the content (see content warnings below). It can also be challenging to follow at times. 

There are multiple characters with the same name and the story does tend to bounce around so it can be difficult to figure out which of the characters are being referenced until you either keep reading for more context or think back on your own mental/physical notes. This was obviously an intentional choice by the author perfect for literary analysis. It also helps to look up a family tree which I referenced a number of times while reading.

A few literary analyses I read often referred that the cycle of deaths in this family as an allegory for the cycle of violence in Latin American history due to colonialism and desire for power. This is something I can see vividly in Gabriel García Márquez’s depictions, especially with the Banana Massacre in 1928.

Overall it is a heavily character driven story with intriguing depictions and finely walks the line between reality and the supernatural (magical realism at its best). It’s disparaging, depressing, surprising, frustrating, bizarre, hopeful, and at times all of these all at once. I’m definitely not done dissecting all of the underlying messages. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Gun violence, Murder, Rape, Incest, and War

Moderate: Racial slurs, Suicidal thoughts, and Suicide

leonormsousa's review against another edition

challenging slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Overall opinion: I liked it. I didn't love it like I thought I would, but I honestly think the way I read it also had quite a big impact on my experience and final opinion.

I took two weeks and a half to read this book, which is quite a lot for me, and I think that stopped me from feeling fully immersed in the story.

On the other end, the misogyny (and incest) didn't sit well with me. I recognise that it might make sense given the context but nonetheless, I can't help but feel that there were unnecessary parts that could have been handled better. And even with the context, it made me feel uncomfortable and that's something that always stains my reading experience. 

I feel like I need to justify myself because I know this is the favourite of so many (and because it was a direct rec from someone that means so much to me). I especially feel like I need to talk about what I didn't like because what I liked it's quite obvious.

Gabriel Gracía Márquez writes in a wonderful and quirky way. He's an excellent storyteller that knows how to make a message come to life in the form of a narrative. His mastery of magical realism is indisputable.

I guess this was more of a me problem. I feel like I failed to see the big picture and the whole thing fell short to me. The good news is: I can't stop thinking about how a reread in a couple of years will likely become a much more enjoyable experience. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Rape, Sexual assault, Emotional abuse, Grief, Pedophilia, Sexism, Suicidal thoughts, Terminal illness, War, Abandonment, Child death, Chronic illness, Colonisation, Confinement, Toxic relationship, Adult/minor relationship, Vomit, Body shaming, Child abuse, Incest, Infidelity, Murder, Animal death, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Death, Death of parent, and Violence

zendthyl's review against another edition

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Infidelity, Miscarriage, Pedophilia, Rape, Suicidal thoughts, War, Adult/minor relationship, Dementia, Injury/Injury detail, Misogyny, Child death, Death, Domestic abuse, Police brutality, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Sexual content, Mental illness, Medical trauma, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Child abuse, Gun violence, Murder, Sexual assault, Eating disorder, Genocide, Incest, and Violence

gaby_inz's review against another edition

challenging reflective tense fast-paced

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

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide, Cursing, Incest, Misogyny, Murder, Pedophilia, Child death, Infidelity, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Miscarriage, Sexual content, Rape, Suicide attempt, War, Adult/minor relationship, Blood, Colonisation, Death, Death of parent, Grief, Pregnancy, Sexual assault, and Alcohol

Moderate: Genocide, Infertility, Suicidal thoughts, Injury/Injury detail, Emotional abuse, Excrement, Forced institutionalization, Animal cruelty, Miscarriage, Sexual violence, Body horror, Confinement, Fire/Fire injury, Dementia, and Misogyny

lizzzitro's review against another edition

challenging mysterious sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcohol, Animal cruelty, Child abuse, Child death, Gun violence, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Sexual harassment, Violence, Vomit, Eating disorder, Incest, Mass/school shootings, Miscarriage, Pedophilia, Pregnancy, Rape, War, Adult/minor relationship, Sexual content, and Suicide attempt

catapocalypse's review against another edition

challenging funny reflective slow-paced

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

5.0

There is so, so much to say about this book.

First, I can't believe how seldom its humor is brought up by others! There's a lot of focus placed on the heavy, cynical, serious elements, but there's also many absurd and silly and tongue-in-cheek and clever elements!

Even while mixing all those things, García Márquez subtly shifts the feel of the narrative as it progresses. Mind, this is an entirely character-driven story, with little to no real plot beyond the lifespan of the Buendía family and their town of Macondo. Folks who prefer plot-driven stories may find this book incredibly boring! But as time passes, the family, town, and narrative itself seem to shift and mature in a way. The beginnings of all three feature many fantastic elements. There are flights of fancy viewed with an almost childlike wonder. Time feels more sprawling.

But as things progress, they become more grounded in reality (though never entirely), and more serious events and concerns pop up. The little town of Macondo starts without even a mayor, but gradually sees Colonel Aureliano Buendía's war, the influence of foreign colonizing powers, and the high tension of the banana company worker strikes. Time gradually speeds up to the hurricane pace of the ending.

Across this lifespan of the Buendía family and Macondo, there's a lot going on, and García Márquez brilliantly connects all of it together. Even fanciful elements are not careless. I feel it has high reread value, and might even consider an immediate reread if I didn't have so much else to get to right now.

I do have some warnings. While the narrative is fairly linear in time, there are some overlapping points where events are retraced when the focus has moved between characters. This isn't so bad, so long as you can keep track of the many similarly-named ones. I recommend an edition that provides a family tree, like that from Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

There are also many Content Warnings, some rather significant, so please check out those listed for the book on its entry!

The prevalence of some of this, especially of the incest and problematic relationships between adults and minors, will definitely turn off some readers, which is valid! I was conflicted on its inclusion the entire way through, but ultimately, I think it ties into the presentation of the Buendía family as being deeply flawed. Let's face it, Úrsula was probably right about everything all along.

I'm sure there are even further layers I'm not fathoming. I do think that this book fully deserves its status as a classic, and I will absolutely read more Gabriel García Márquez. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Dementia, Eating disorder, Grief, Gun violence, Incest, Infidelity, Mass/school shootings, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Murder, Pedophilia, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Toxic relationship, and Violence

Moderate: Blood, Bullying, Confinement, Death of parent, Emotional abuse, Medical content, Racial slurs, Racism, and Trafficking

Minor: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Cancer, Cannibalism, Homophobia, and Vomit

sherbertwells's review

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

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

3.0

I cannot pick out a single sentence or paragraph to quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude, the famous novel by Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, because presenting such a small fragment of the text would erase its magic. The story’s individual episodes, which chronicle the rise and fall of the Buendía family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, are iconic in their own right. But reviews like mine (and John Green’s, which encouraged me to read this book) can’t capture its appeal in full. Nevertheless, it is a wonderful and terrible (that is, terror-inspiring) story that wasn’t my favorite book but might become yours.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a classic today because its story is gorgeously told. Translator Gregory Rabassa does a great job presenting the original Spanish sentences in clear-but-whimsical English, but Márquez deserves most of the credit. Every description or phrase is precise and luscious, from riverstones “like prehistoric eggs” to wind “full of voices from the past...murmurs of ancient geraniums, sights of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia” (1, 415). Between its covers I encountered the names for a thousand conditions that I had experienced but only now recognized in the narratives of fictional characters.

Some of those characters are pretty neat. Since One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place over a century, individual Buendías frequently step into out out of the spotlight, appearing just often enough to perpetuate the family curse in their own unique way. While most female characters conform to the patriarchal attitudes of the 19th- and 20th century—Fernanda and Petra Cotes in particular embody the worst parts of the virgin-whore dichotomy—Úrsula, the matriarch, is a real badass. She’s tenacious. While she isn’t a soldier or a scholar like her male relatives, she saves their lives several times with her stubbornness and knowledge of medicine, and without her influence the family fortunes really start to go downhill. The Roma scholar Melquiades and the second-to-last Aureliano are also neat, since their pursuit of knowledge frames the story. But everyone else is a bit of a disaster.

Stories with horrible, ambiguously-framed characters can sometimes be shocking or cathartic, but the rape, pedophilia and incest in this book occur so casually that I’m not even sure they happened. For example, Remedios Moscote marries Colonel Aureliano Buendía a month after getting her first period but “before getting over the habits of her childhood” (84). Amaranta Buendía sexually abuses two of her underage nephews, and one looks back on the experience with longing! Meanwhile, the first encounter of Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano is an initially-nonconsensual “battle to the death” (396). If all three of these affairs weren’t framed as dramatic romances, perhaps they would merely be manifestations of the screwed-up Buendía family dynamic. As is, I feel like José Arcadio Segundo after a particularly spoiler-y incident: That just happened, didn’t it? It was awful, wasn’t it? Am I supposed to see the ramifications of abuse in the same way I see the plague of insomnia or the Assumption of Remedios the Beauty, as normal parts of life in Macondo?

Some people enjoy One Hundred Years of Solitude’s glorious moral ambiguity, and I suspect most of my disdain for it is merely a matter of taste. So is my ambivalence to the novel’s other affairs. Before reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I had no idea how much of the story was about sex. It’s the foundation for approximately 90% of the romances and 65% of the plot points, and while some amount of romantic shenanigans is par for the course in a family saga, it feels like every time a character is about to learn something or change history they get distracted by an attractive stranger/villager/relative! Maybe it’s a Buendía thing. It’s just not mine.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a classic novel of magnificent quality. My conflicted reaction to the story isn’t ambivalence, but a mixture of great love and mild personal dislike. Like the tangled Buendía family tree, the parts I love depend on the parts I don’t, and even now I can’t split them up.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Incest, Pedophilia, Child abuse, Sexual content, and Mass/school shootings

Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Violence, Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, Stalking, Gun violence, and Death of parent

Minor: Abortion, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Homophobia, Trafficking, and Cancer

keenanmaree's review

challenging reflective medium-paced

• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Bullying, Dementia, Eating disorder, Forced institutionalization, Incest, Infidelity, Medical content, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Police brutality, Rape, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, and Toxic relationship

Moderate: Ableism, Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Child death, Eating disorder, Gun violence, Police brutality, Sexism, Sexual content, Torture, and Violence

Minor: Addiction, Alcoholism, Child death, Chronic illness, Confinement, Death, Dementia, and Excrement