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One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hardcover) (Hardcover)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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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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Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pub. in: July, 2003
ISBN: 0060531045
Pages: 432
Measurements: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00444
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- MSL Picks -
In this century-long story of a rural Columbian town, Sr. Marquez tells of a family whose memorable members, amidst all the glory, prosperity and apparent happiness, in the end stand each alone in life. I think he tells us how our remorse, scars, pride, fear, resignation and forgetfulness lead us to live and die in solitude, even in the sea of humanity, and that such lives are, in the end, as if not having been lived at all, for they will not be remembered.
For all of the numerous people who populate the story, the character development is deep and wholly convincing of each joy and suffering, of which the ups and downs are considerable as the tale unfolds. The story is told with a mixture of honesty toward the brutality of Columbian national life, rich fables and superstitions of the locality, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's own twists of imagination that immensely enrich the experience. The underlining profound themes and the overarching sadness of the story is sprinkled with laugh-out-loud humors and brilliant observations of subtleties of life that reminded me of Milan Kundera, though the context is obviously a world apart.
This is one of those stories that, having read, one feels rather exhausted from the emotional upheavals, and needs some time to let it ferment a little. After a while it starts to emit an aroma that challenges one's conscience with the relevance of what was said. It's a story-telling at its best from a Columbian national treasure. And the English translation is superb in capturing the tone.
This is truly one of the best novels ever written. It transcends its time and place by virtue of being mythical and universal. The last paragraph in particular is incredibly profound and seems to summarize not only the novel but mankind's existence; consider how it relates to religious concepts of creation, destruction, and human sin. Few novels offer greater scope, imagination, imagery, or ideas.
Target readers:
General readers
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One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) (Paperback)
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia in 1928. His many books include The Autumn of the Patriarch; No One Writes to the Colonel; Love in the Time of Cholera; a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale; and, most recently, a novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
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From the Publisher:
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career.
The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility - the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth - these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master.
Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race.
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| View all 8 comments |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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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