From the Bookshelf of 2025 Reading Challenge…

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

Start date: February 1, 2025

Finish date: February 28, 2025

Discussion: October 2025 Group Read

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October 2025 Group Read

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Oct 07, 2018 Kristi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reading-challenge-2018, read-harder-2018

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. When Jose Arcadio Buendia marries his cousin Ursula and ends up founding the town of Macondo, it's the beginning of an epic line of Buendias. Soldiers, cads, scholars, queens, nuns... this family has it all. Time has a curious effect on them. Their fortunes wax and wane, babies are born. But the old don't always die when they should, and even when they do, they don't necessarily stay completely dead. In each generation, Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios are born, inheriting the traits and sometimes e When Jose Arcadio Buendia marries his cousin Ursula and ends up founding the town of Macondo, it's the beginning of an epic line of Buendias. Soldiers, cads, scholars, queens, nuns... this family has it all. Time has a curious effect on them. Their fortunes wax and wane, babies are born. But the old don't always die when they should, and even when they do, they don't necessarily stay completely dead. In each generation, Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios are born, inheriting the traits and sometimes even the fates of their Buendia forebears. Their loves and losses make for an epic tale of of magical realism.

This book is basically the most epically magically realist thing that I can imagine. If you have the patience and the focus to allow it to envelope you, it is an amazing effect. It's as if you are floating in a realm where the real and the unreal coexist and even interact. The lines between reality and fantasy are blurred so much as to feel almost seamless at times. And time is not linear but instead seems to loop around and invert and circle back on itself. But to really appreciate the overall effect, you have to be able to wade through dozens of people with similar names whose relationships are often so legitimately convoluted that they themselves aren't sure who is who.

There are parts of this book that are really heartbreaking--and it's interesting that so many of the ones that are heartbreaking are also somewhat nonsensical. The majority of the characters in the book are flawed in serious ways, even though some of them also seem to be incredibly gifted in others. Their romances are fraught, sometimes with good cause and sometimes for utterly pointless reasons, and many of them end in great tragedy. The way that the vignettes are introduced add to the feeling of history repeating itself and of events playing out in such a complex way that they had to be foretold by Pilar Ternera's cards or Melquiades' manuscript. So many of the stories stuck with me. Jose Arcadio witnessed thousands of murdered workers being shipped off on trains, but no one believed him because the state had rewritten history. Meme fell in love with Mauricio Babilonia who was always surrounded by a bevy of yellow butterflies, but her mother's fanaticism led to her death and her mute consignment to a nunnery. Aureliano Segundo and his mistress Petra Cotes made scandalous love in their youth but then fell sweetly in love in their old age. And so many others.

I have to say that the end of the book really clinched it for me. Up until the last quarter or so, I was thinking that I might have preferred Love in the Time of Cholera because its plot is less meandering and convoluted. But that began to change at the end and particularly when I got to the end of Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano's tragic love story, which really tugged at my heartstrings as the last gasp of hope for a doomed line. When I read the translated epigraph written by Melquiades, "The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants," I realized that all of the convoluted histories of the Buendias were to be wiped from the face of the earth, even before I read the final sentence. I was indeed like Aureliano: "Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave the room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." How fitting that the final Aureliano should be born with the tail of a big as his great-great-great-grandmother Ursula had so feared.

I hope to come back to this novel again when I have the time to read it closely and in a few sittings. I suspect that it will be even better on the second pass.

Read Harder Challenge 2018: An Oprah Book Club Selection ...more

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