One Hundred Years of Solitude in Read a book from each country

Dec 14, 2008 J rated it really liked it

Shelves: latin-american-fiction

I've been meaning to get around to this book for years. It really in an incredible piece of work. Marquez creates a microcosm for an entire culture in his village of Macondo and the prolonged multi-generational plight of the Buendia family. It only occurs to me now after having read it how many novels I've read from the past 40 years which have shamelessly raided Marquez's book for ideas both lyrical and structural. It often felt not so much like I was reading a book, but as though I was ramblin ...more

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Sep 21, 2017 Paula Savioli rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks

This was probably the most complicated book to rate that I ever read.

It took me 9 month to finish it because I had to take a break of some months. I read the most of it hating it completely. Really, I was planing to give up halfway through and give it 1 star, because I have rarely been so bored by a book. You start reading the story of a character, then it goes on and on, and suddenly I found myself having no idea what was happening. In fact, I didn’t even remember where the story of the previou This was probably the most complicated book to rate that I ever read.

It took me 9 month to finish it because I had to take a break of some months. I read the most of it hating it completely. Really, I was planing to give up halfway through and give it 1 star, because I have rarely been so bored by a book. You start reading the story of a character, then it goes on and on, and suddenly I found myself having no idea what was happening. In fact, I didn’t even remember where the story of the previous character had stopped, and this new story about some political fact started. Nor could I say what had happened to that character. I didn’t want to keep going back, so I went on for the longest part of the book finding some parts rather confusing. When I first noticed that half the male characters are called Aureliano and the other half Jose Arcadio, I noticed the facts were so mixed up in my mind that I still don’t know what exactly happened to each Aureliano. I don’t remember who is the child of whom. I confess I only know some of these relations because in the end of the book some of those things are mentioned.

Really, I had no will to keep reading. So I stopped and did other things for some months. Then, probably out of a sense of completing things left undone, I decided to just finish this damn book and be over with it. The problem was I didn’t remember where I had stopped and had lost my marker. So I decided to read random parts more or less in the last third of the book to see where there was a part I didn’t remember. So going through random segments, I started to find the sentences so funny. Why in hell didn’t I laugh in the whole book before that? I ended up reading part of it again, because I picked it up from a part I didn’t remember, but I had probably dozed off in my first reading, because I had already read parts that came later.

But this time I found everything so hilarious and absurd. Then the things I had read months before started to come back to my head and I started to admire their absurdity. I mean, why hadn’t I found it fantastic that the twins Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo switched places so often that no one knew if they were who they were, and that Ursula thought they ended up being switched for the rest of their lives.
How didn’t I find it fantastic that it once rained for 4 years, and people would just say they would do this or that when the rain stopped, even though that was as impossible as the 4-year-long rain itself was.
How I laughed the second time I read Amarant Ursula saying that if she had a boy he would by no means be called Aureliano or Jose Arcadio, and if it was a girl, no way she would be called Remedios. I love how the characters know the characters all have the same name, and how they think that is a curse, but the names keep repeating. In the end, Amaranta Ursula has a boy, and he is called Aureliano, like the ones before him. By the way, I also found it absurdly hilarious how one of the Aurelianos suddenly has 17 bastard sons and they decide to name all of them Aureliano, for lack of another name. And how after being mentioned in most of the book, in the end the new generations think the colonel Aureliano Buendia didn’t even exist, that he is some legend, and how even history believes none of the things he did ever happened, and how a priest says the one before last Aureliano has that name not because of his unexistant ancestor, but because there was an Aureliano Buendia street and people once named their kids after streets.
It’s bizar how Meme’s boyfriend always had yellow butterflies around him, so everybody knows he’s there and the butterflies get everywhere in the house.
And how Aureliano (Meme’s son) and Amaranta Ursula decide to live with closed doors and windows forever, so they can be naked all the time to accelerate the process of taking their clothes off, because they have sex all the time anyway. And they do so for so absurdly long without leaving the house that he doesn’t even know the people anymore when he does, and the places he knew are gone and the people forgotten.

And how weird and impossible things happen all the time, but nobody cares or notices them. Actually, they treat them like daily life facts. What can be more normal than a child being born with a pig’s tail? You can cut it later, so there’s nothing to worry about. But I think the moment I what sure Gabriel Garcia Marquez was mad was when all Meme’s 70+ school friends go visit her in their vacations at the same time, so the house is so full with almost 100 people that the bathroom line gets endless. So the solution was to buy 72 pots, that were stored forever in a room after the people were gone. And how there were so many people that there wasn't enough space for them to eat at the same time, so they had to take turns, which meant that when the last ones were finishing their breakfast, the first ones were beginning to have lunch. I think none of this seems funny, but it’s the matter-of-factness with which he tells it that makes it funny.

The historical and political comments are such an intelligent parody of our world that I can’t even start…

The end surprised me in a positive way. How the whole story was written in Melchiades’s parchments since the beginning, waiting to be read by someone who would undersand.

The fact is that I hated this book so much in the begenning, and that in the end the number of stars I wanted to give it just went up and up. I love how crazy this book is. I just didn’t give it 5 stars because it is indeed rather boring. For some reason I hated it for a long time, but now the more I think of it the more I like it. Maybe you just have to be in the mood for it. Or maybe if you don’t like this book, it’s because you weren’t prepared to read it yet. ...more

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Aug 13, 2008 Daniela rated it liked it

Shelves: big-disappointments

God, how enthralling the first 50 pages sounded! Then I simply got lost in the endless succession of Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios and Remedioses (?). If only it spread over 3 generations and spared me the details of ants invading the decaying houses on and off and filth permeating souls and levitating fig-like old women and clairvoyant hirsute loners...

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