Reviews with content warning for Rape - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Reviews tagging 'Rape'

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

111 reviews

jolineliest's review against another edition

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aseel_reads's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced

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

2.0

i did not like this at all. i can see the elements of the book that would make it good to study in a classroom and the magical realism parts were interesting, as were the creation and destruction of the town/see the advancements of technology/parts of history, but i just did not care for any of the characters, especially the frequent description of their s*x lives.

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sploack's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

What the hell did I just read? Not only does this book not have any plot whatsoever, but it also seamlessly normalizes sexism, violence, cheating, incest, animal abuse, child abuse and pedophilia. And is there even a single likeable character in the whole story? In my opinion they’re all shamelessly terrible people.

Its only merit is that it is well written, but that can’t save it from me giving it 1 star.

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natalie809's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

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

4.5

I really wish i knew spanish so i could read the original text! But regardless this book is amazing. Just not incredibly enjoyable all the time and took a lot of patience.

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artemisg's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

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

5.0

This book is a 5-star sun with a 1-star rising. By that, I mean I consider it a 5-star novel, but I completely understand the 1- to 2-star ratings. Some moments made me deeply uncomfortable, and not in a confronting and powerful way, just in an icky way. Other moments were genuinely confronting and powerful, and I imagine they would be more so if I had connections to Colombia, or communism, or unionising, or colonisation. I do not, but the effect of this book was still overall powerful and meaningful. I think this book will stay with me for a long time - not just because I’m pretentious about reading classics, but also because it was good.

I will admit it took me a long time to read this, initially because I was weirded out, but once I got over the odd relationships and generally weird aspects of the story, I wanted to savour it. There’s truly nothing like starting my day with a cup of tea and a chapter of some of the most insane literature I’ve ever read. I loved the writing style of this book, the disconnected description and comma heavy paragraphs, skipping from character to character with reckless abandon, and the calling back to things that happened chapters and decades ago. Also, the similes? The metaphors? The mixture of metaphorical and literal language surrounding the magic that the Buendía family and Macondo experience? Incredible.

Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.

On the topic of magic, I’m obsessed with magical realism shoutout to Márquez for inventing the genre. There’s something so fun about wholly insane and impossible things happening and the characters just accepting it as normal. How did so many people live for over a century, how did Colonel Aureliano have 17 sons who all had his energy, and how did the ash crosses on their foreheads not fade? How did yellow flowers fall from the sky? How did it rain for literally 4 years? How did no one question any of it? I loved it.

So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

I also loved the practical realism, the product of the time nature of the civil wars, the banana plantation, the unionising, the union-busting, and the killing of protestors. (Sad that the union-related issues are still prevalent literally today, but that’s not really relevant. Although that proves that this book is currently relevant, I think it will always be. A deep dive into the tragedy that is human nature - “the solitary fate” - will always be relevant).

…once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

And the ending? Incredible, showstopping, never been done before. I genuinely loved it; it was so satisfying, despite being so deeply sad. This book made me nostalgic for times I didn’t live in (and wouldn’t want to live in, to be honest) and made me care about shocking people. Loved it.

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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slow-paced

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

4.75

I mainly picked this up because I put it on hold at the library during a (very brief) classics-reading kick earlier this year and promptly forgot about it. When it came available, I figured I might as well read it.

This story chronicles six-ish generations of the Buendía family and the small town of Macondo. Family heads José Arcadio and Úrsula, along with a group of unrelated other people, take a long trek into the jungle and build a town. Their family grows, their children have children of their own, and the Buendía family gets bigger – in number, in wealth, in stature in the town. Times change, war happens, the town becomes less isolated, new scientific inventions happen, the family begins to disperse away from the town. The town of Macondo rises, and then falls, with the Buendía family.

This is a weird book, but from my limited experience with magical realism, this is weird in ways consistent with the genre. It’s like the real world, but a little to the left. Alchemy is a thing that works, there’s a side character who may be immortal or may be already dead, one character gets medical treatment from psychic doctors who are thousands of miles away, a character gets taken up into heaven, and nobody views this as at all out of the ordinary. In fact, magnifying glasses and turning metal into gold are treated with equal seriousness and excitement, like the ability to put the right ingredients into a pot and turn them into gold is a neat scientific advancement like curving glass to make things bigger.

The thing that surprised me the most about this book is that for all its century-spanning scale and magical realism bizarreness, it’s remarkably human. None of these characters are great people, but they’re all doing their best in their circumstances. I found something relatable in every character – in Úrsula’s resourcefulness in keeping the family functional; in José Arcadio’s desire to learn all about cool new things; in Fernanda’s rigid adherence to rules; in Amaranta Úrsula’s desire to leave the small town where she grew up and grow in the wider world; in Remedios the Beauty’s … well, let’s be honest, Remedios the Beauty was who I wish I could be. There are six generations of Buendías, each of whom love and lose, grow and die, succeed, fail, make mistakes, and ultimately just are in all their messy glory. It sounds pretentious to say this book is about the human condition, but it kind of is.

My biggest struggle was keeping the characters straight. Normally I would blame this on the audiobook format, and it is what caused my difficulty remembering Arcadio and Aureliano were two different characters. But the book itself doesn’t make it easy on me, either. This family reuses names a lot – there are three José Arcadios (and one just Arcadio), three Remedioses, and twenty-two Aurelianos (although to be fair, only four of them actually have major roles). There are also 32 biological relatives and 8 spouses stretching across the century this book covers, not to mention characters who aren’t part of the Buendía family. At some point, I felt like I needed to give them numbers to tell them apart.

I didn’t think I was much for the “sweeping family saga” type of book, but if they’re anything like this, I may have to reconsider. I didn’t get particularly attached to any one character (unless you count Remedios the Beauty, who I mainly loved because she’s #goals), but I enjoyed seeing the high-level view of the rise and fall, fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendías. One Hundred Years of Solitude is, much to my surprise, an enjoyable and remarkably relatable book.

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