One Hundred Years of Solitude in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Nov 04, 2017 Sarah rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, classics, latin-america-fiction, best-books-ever

Though this did not turn out to be my favorite of Márquez's books, it is clear why it's the one for which he's most remembered. Stylistically, it's different than everything else of his I've read, like "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," in which the stories lean to the realistic, if exaggerated, world, and then there are chunks of the magical thrown in at, for example, the end of chapters or in big blocks, but not really all throughout. In this book, almost every Though this did not turn out to be my favorite of Márquez's books, it is clear why it's the one for which he's most remembered. Stylistically, it's different than everything else of his I've read, like "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," in which the stories lean to the realistic, if exaggerated, world, and then there are chunks of the magical thrown in at, for example, the end of chapters or in big blocks, but not really all throughout. In this book, almost every sentence is a separate short story of magic realism, and often one sentence is all the exploration you get of that particular piece of the magically-real story. It's almost like 500 pages of one-sentence stories in some ways, and I cannot even begin to conceptualize the skill one would need to construct a novel like this one, especially in this case, since Márquez literally invented this genre.

The story itself is sweeping, and I did love its telling of the modern history of Latin America. Like many people, I found the characters hard to keep straight, but because it was Márquez, and because I understood what he was trying to do with so many of the same names across multiple generations of the family, I just dug in and persisted. And of course, who could resist that first line? It's so good that even if you have to put the book down to save it for a time in which you're capable of reading something you envision may be depressing, you'll never forget it and know you have to come back to it, as I did.

Márquez deals with so many themes in this book, all of which are worth mention here, but I think it is this novel that has helped me articulate the second reason he's one of my favorite writers. The first reason is, of course, that he was simply a master of language, and as I read his work, I understand fully that his sentence may abruptly shift mid-way through, requiring the reader to slow down, avoid prediction, and savor each tiny piece of the story. If you skim or blink, you will miss some of the world's best turns of phrase. But in this book, I've also realized that Márquez wrote women more fairly and more realistically than any male writer I've ever read; One Hundred Years of Solitude spends a lot of time focused on sex, and upon finishing the book, I found myself struck by the way Márquez wrote women in sex scenes: just like he wrote men in sex scenes. It is shocking in its simplicity and rarity. I guess it should not be surprising that Márquez was a feminist, given his politics in general, but that's precisely why this moment is so striking: I've read plenty of feminist male writers, but he's the only one I can credit with this radically-egalitarian portrayal.

I also think this is a novel I need to sit with for awhile. May be updating this review as I mull it over... ...more

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