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One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hardcover) (精装)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
It's Garcia Marquez, a rare master of language: the interplay of reality, fantasy, and magic all in breathtakingly brilliant prose. An epic! |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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Washington Post Book World (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
More lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man. |
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William Kennedy (New York Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry that is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man... Mr. Garca Mrquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life. |
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Alex Wilber (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. "Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.
The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women - the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar - who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."
With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature. |
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Karl Mohd (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
This epic novel is as much about non-change and having one's subconscious roots stick with them, as much as it is about the outwardly, external transformations going on in the adaptable town of Macondo. The vast interplay among genders and other relationship roles between the conservative moralist and the liberal freedom fighter, religion and science, old and young, lovers and lustful temptations, community and business, health and openness, etc define the rapid transformations that invade the sleepy hamlet of Macondo and the residents of it's original founders of the Buendias and the Arcadios. As much as men are at the center of action during war, strikes, assassinations, persecutions, scientific and geographical discovery, and the search for sexual satisfaction, women hold the core of the household and people's sanity together. It is the patience and selflessness Ursula, Pilar, Renata, and finally Fernanda exude that smoothes out the roughened edges and keeps the house remarkably intact without any significant violence breaking out, with one exception and with maintaining a self-respect for the pioneers that came before them.
It is through the ineffective fallibility of the men's characterstics to repeat the mistakes of the past and eventually lead into a parochial faceted neuroticism that leads to the destruction of the last becon of fortitude in Macondo, the Buendias household. Melquiades' prophetic words reverberate in one's mind as the final victims of their complacency are diminished to death by the ravages of nature and by their resignation to complete the cyclical journey of ending peacefully one's journey at the point of one's nascent origination.
One hundred years pass never to be repeated or documented and written off to the annals of history. This ending, sadly paralleled the destruction reaped upon this quaint villages through the forces of imperialist, industrial, capitalism. Losing it's connectivty and bonds led to the destruction of Macondo with such unforeseen forces only to be overwhelmed by it at the end with nothing to record the reasons for it's fall. Therefore, it was bound to repeat and repeat it did until a higher consciousness was awakened by further tragedies that would lead to the obliteration of millions of lives with WWI and WW II.
The Macondo's no longer exist and innocence has been lost through years of backstabbing exploitation, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez has given us all a treasure that we can rejoice in our solitude that will balance our perspective and leave us attune to our inner peace among the rapid, stop n go, rollercoaster ride hecticness that is life. Truly a must read for anyone searching for the roots and meaning of effective balance. |
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Robert Moore (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
This remarkable novel had been on my "Must Read Soon" list for nearly twenty years, and with some shame I admit that I only recently got around to it. What a stunning masterpiece this is! I had read Love in a Time of Cholera shortly after it appeared in English translation, and enjoyed it immensely, but as excellent as that was, it in no way prepared me for this amazing book. Garcia Marquez's virtuosity is apparent on every page, assembling a vast array of improbable and unusual elements and blending them together to produce something utterly unique. He reminds me of those jugglers in a circus who spin plates on sticks, balancing them on every conceivable part of their body. Garcia Marquez brings in such disparate elements that one can't imagine that he will manage to be able to keep all his plates up in the air. Remarkably, he does.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel we most frequently associate with Magical Realism. It is impossible to think of this book without referring to "magic," but the magic has as much to do with Garcia Marquez 's astonishing mastery of his material as it does with the extraordinary events that occur in the novel. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been a dreadful novel. Even a very good writer could be given a Cliff Notes summary of the book, and be asked to produce their own version, and produce a literary horror. The material is difficult, but Garcia Marquez works it with a phenomenally deft touch, crafting it as superbly as Colonel Aureliano does his tiny gold fish. What is as unlikely is the way that he continuously introduces one supernatural element-a woman ascending to heaven while folding sheets, four years of rain followed by ten years of drought, a woman so sensual that her lovemaking causes livestock to reproduce at an usually fecund pace, a priest who levitates when drinking hot chocolate - after another without each new miracle seeming stale or losing its effect.
The novel differs from most modern novels in that it does not contain in depth analyses of the characters. In fact, the characters aren't in general realistic characters at all. They function more like archetypes, and are sharply divided by gender. Men tend to act in the public arena, while women are guardians of the home and have it as their realm of influence. But not even the more fully drawn characters in the novel, such as Colonel Aureliano or his mother Ursula, emerge as full blown characters as in most serious novels in the 20th century. Nor is there a tightly constructed plot. Rather, the novel consists of a series of remarkable, fantastical collection of events and characters centered on a particular South American town. Some readers I know who want in depth, realistic characters have found the novel disappointing. But I have trouble accepting that a novel can take only one form.
One could easily make the case that this is the most influential novel of the past forty years. It has had a profound influence not only in the Latin American world, but on writers in virtually every culture in the world. It has achieved a remarkable success in countries as disparate as Japan, Russia, the United States, and the various European nations. It is widely read in Africa and has been embraced in the Arab world as a modern day version of The Arabian Nights. The novel enjoys as close as one can find to universal appeal of any work of the past half century. My belief is that its success is merited and that it is one of the most remarkable novels that one can find. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
Have never been a lover of reading but I have read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" not once but twice because of its depth and angle on humanity. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is pure genius, there is absolutely nothing prosaic about his prose. This book deals with every single human emotion and experience imaginable ranging from murder, incest,prostitution, sex, gluttony, family, friendship, hatred, unrequited love, self-acceptance, death, war, sadness, weaknesses, love and a whole lot more.
The way in which each character of the Buendia family is described is magnificent to say the least. Their faults are portrayed in the most unapologetic way, as equal to their strengths. Somehow it seems we can't escape fate and although we would want to do what seems moral we always end up simply living. The lessons are profound not simply because the characters suffer from many a self-inflicted wound, but rather because we can relate to each and every one of them. Regardless of age, race or station in life everyone can see themselves in at least one of these characters. As the name suggests, the underlying current is one of the emptiness of the human spirit and the ease with which man can become at war with himself. This book has had a tremendous impact on the way I look at the world and human nature - it doesn't cut to the core, it punctures it. The sentences are the longest imaginable but somehow you won't find yourself out of breath by the time you get to the full stop. Put simply, I would like to get my hands on every single Marquez novel! |
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J. E. Barnes (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
Gabriel Garcia Marquez' groundbreaking masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is both a comic and a tragic meditation on numberless vagaries of human existence.
As the book's title suggests, the novel details the history of three generations in the Buendia family, who found the small, isolated, and swamp-surrounded South American town of Macondo during the 19th century. As an authentic and frequently unprecedented work of literature, One Hundred Years of Solitude stands as a robust and healthy challenge to the social, religious, and literary excesses of Protestantism, to which it offers a brilliantly colored, deeply felt, and sensual alternative. With its underpinnings in pagan Catholicism, One Hundred Years of Solitude boils over with a psychologically profound, brash, visceral, and distinctly Latin vision of life.
Flying freely in the face of Western scientific and philosophical rationalism, the novel offers its readers plagues of forgetfulness, sleeplessness, and clouds of yellow butterflies, ascensions by the living into the heavens, lifelong correspondences with "invisible doctors," "suspicions of elves," and rain storms and droughts that continue for years on end. One character senses that the Buendias are caught in a tight chronal frame of eternal reoccurrence, while another, perceiving a world without genuine boundaries of any kind, plucks knowledge from a collective unconscious floating in the air while claiming "everything is known." Though levitating priests, flying carpet-riding Arabs, fraternal twins who trade destinies, and miraculous inventions abound, the novel never strays very far from its genuine and sincerely felt focus on the vicissitudes of the perpetually vulnerable, desiring, and inherently daydreaming nature of man. Among other things, One Hundred Years of Solitude is also a profound meditation on the absurdly barbaric nature of war and the greedy, egotistical, and shortsighted character of the political arena.
The Buendia family produces - and keeps producing - two basic kinds of men: idealistic, solitary, single-minded, and creative introverts, represented by the family's patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia and his son, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, and the more virile, self-serving, and callous hedonists best represented by sexually potent near-giant Jose Arcadio. Only the perceptive, long-suffering, and ancient family matriarch, Ursula Iguaran, struggles to maintain an objective and ordered understanding of the generally Dionysian chaos that surrounds and eventually envelopes her extended brood. For Ursula, there is little if any relief ever, as the forces of nature and ungainly human passion continuously destroy and deface the fruits of the family?s often admirable labors. In the extended, complex, and secretive tangle of Macondo interrelationships, it is Ursula who consciously struggles to prevent incestuous couplings; her continuous prophecy that unbridled lust and misguided emotional liaisons will eventually produce a monster, "a child with the tail of a pig," resounds throughout the book.
The theme of human solitude is underscored as the one constant and dependable fact of human existence. Every character, by the very nature of their individuality, as well as by the simple hard truths of procreation, is set apart from the others in some distinct but irrevocable manner, whether it be their otherworldly beauty, idiot nature, inherent reflexivity, or a traumatizing episode in their childhoods. Living together in the vast Buendia complex, which is continually collapsing and being rebuilt, the characters often spend months in silence or near silence, even during periods of prosperity and relative happiness.
Some characters happily board themselves up in shuttered rooms and become unwashed hermit scholars, while others, quietly planning illusory acts of revenge in response to illusory wrongs, simply don't speak out of spite for the span of their lifetimes. Some lose their minds as a result of their shattered dreams and obsessive memories of youthful promise. Ghosts of the dead walk the rooms and corridors too, equally isolated in death as in life. One comparatively minor character, Santa Sofia de la Piedad, like Georgina Hogg in Muriel Spark's The Comforters (1957), simply ceases to exist from time to time at the author's whim. Even the more blithe and extroverted characters express themselves predominantly through action rather than words, and for all except Ursula, the stifling burden of unconsciousness is easier to bare than the sustained effort that consciousness requires.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said that One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him in "an illumination," a statement that the novel's warm, organic, and fluidly archetypal prose bears out completely. Unlike the later Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), the author's discerning, discriminating, and intruding hand is never sensed. Although frequently funny, brilliantly sustained passages of imaginative and fantastic material (some reminiscent of the Washington Irving of "Knickerbocker's History Of New York," "Dolph Heyliger," and "Wolfert Webber") are often followed by short, terse sentences of extreme brutality, such as one concerning a child hacked to death with a machete for spilling a drink on an arrogant soldier's uniform. The novel's conclusion, which unhappily recalls several of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, may seem inevitable to some readers, while others may find it something of a betrayal of the book's overall tone. Regardless, the glorious miracle that is human existence, and a sense of the inherent, if often hidden, possibilities in all things are sumptuously served up for the reader in passage after passage.
Throughout, One Hundred Years of Solitude offers a compassionate, beatific vision that, while free of hard-edged moralizing, also never swerves away from the unpleasant truths inherent in human nature and man's finite physical existence. Though the repetitious names of many of the characters can become disheartening (5 major and 17 minor characters, for instance, share the name "Aureliano"), like Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1963), it is a novel that can appreciated and understood by all people, regardless of nationality, social status, educational level, or background. |
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Tracy Slagter (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
This is one of the strangest and most powerful books I have ever read. I usually read European classics but had read Love in the Time of Cholera years ago and decided to try Garcia Marquez again. I can honestly say that One Hundred Years of Solitude is by far the most miraculously incredible, fast-paced, confusing, and magical novel I have ever read. I wasn't sad when it ended, because it simply HAD to end where it did; Garcia Marquez has a perfect sense of time.
You find things in this novel that you simply cannot find if you're tied to the European tradition like I am (was). People who live to be 144. Rain that lasts over four years. Women so beautiful they cause death. A man whose presence is marked by swarms of yellow butterflies. People taken up to heaven. An "immaculate" suicide. These things happen all the time in this book, and the remarkable thing is that, for Garcia Marquez, they are perfectly unremarkable. They are an integral, wholly normal part of the world of his imagination, and the reader is fully engrossed in that world until the very last page.
My one piece of advice for those wishing to read this book: read slowly, even when the pace of the plot begs you to flip the page. Things happen suddenly in this book - people die in a sentence and are reborn in the next. The paragraphs are usually long, but they contain thousands of literary treasures you will miss if you blink.
This is a book I will not soon forget. |
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1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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