There’s one word, one innate feeling around which Marquez has woven the intricate and magical world of Macondo, interspersed among which is the story of six generations of the Buendia family : Solitude.
There’s almost this eerie feeling you get while reading this novel, the sense that sooner rather than later, everything is going to fall apart for this family, and yet, desiminated between the cobwebs of sad and sorry relationships, where notions of sexuality, love and lust are inextricably tangled, Marquez manages to interwine between cover to cover a piece of art which encapsulates within itself a vivid world, full of magical realism, where the line between fantasy and blur is much thinner than what we might perceive . The novel has been rightfully described by Rushdie as, “the greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years.”.
One Hundred years of solitude is a profound exploration of human existence, the numerous fault lines that exist within us and how they define our future and the transient nature of all human bonds and sentiments, especially love.
“And that wher-ever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
by AnyEstablishment2226
2 Comments
Interestingly, it is one of those books I couldn’t finish – I was new to English literature and the non-real things were probably too much for me. But I didn’t *hate* it – just that I somehow lost interest.
Later on I found some similarity between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children by Rushdie.
Few years down the line, I read Chronicles of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez and liked them (found love in the time of cholera bit disappointing after i read chronicles of a death foretold, but still better than average).
I think time has come to finish one hundred years of solitude. Probably next year…
The repetation of names can get a little boring.