One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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In a word: spiral

In a sentence: Macondo is built up then swept away with the Buendia family.

Synopsis: Four(ish) generations of the Buendia family live, die, love, kill, build, destroy in the town of Macondo. Time swirls around the inhabitants of the Buendia house as centuries pass in dollops, and life and death continuously chase one another.

Reactions: This book is written in full color magic. Detail is juicy, characters shadowy and overlarge, and what you feel most is the climate of Macondo.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a delicious celebration of humanity. It deals in every human folly from gore to gluttony, lust to loneliness, lethargy to obsession. The Buendia family evolves in a spiral of Arcadios and Aurelianos, Ursulas and Remedios over the centuries showing how far humans can advance and how quickly those same humans might decline.

With the Buendias, Macondo pulses with a similar heartbeat. Uproarious in times of prosperity, weary in times of strife, the reader sees the town’s emotion as a mirror to that of the Buendias. One can taste the unrelenting jungle vegetation as distinctly as the suffocating desert dusts, and hear the revelry from the Street of the Turks as distinctly as the eerie silence following the exodus of the birds.

I chose this book with my only expectation being a surreal reading experience and I was far from disappointed. Expect an intoxicating read. Stories layer circumstance shifts, and events fold back on themselves. This is a text such as Moby Dick from which you can derive a superficial understanding of a family in a village if that’s all you desire, but if peeled back reveals infinite allegory and observation regarding humanity. I anticipate reading this book again several times throughout my life and opening an entirely new book with each rendition.

Read if: you don’t mind being caught up in stories in which sweep through with a fickle sense of time and reality.