Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Looking Glass Trip Through History, 16 Feb 2009
This is not your typical novel. It's difficult, confusing, strongly metaphorical, and far more concerned with history and message than any deep look at its characters. At the same time, it is sometimes lyrical, beautiful, inventive, and given to unexpected trips to the magical, just when it seems bogged down in a very harsh reality.
It's the story of the town of Macondo and the family that help found the town, stretched over the hundred years of the title. It's clear, when you step back from the details of this work, that the entire work is a metaphor for what happened to Columbia, from its early run-in with the Spanish invaders through the exploitive actions of companies out to rip the riches from the country with no regard for the human cost of their endeavors, and on into to the modern day world of political corruption backed by barely sheathed threats of force.
The family that the book follows is unique in many ways, peopled by characters both incredibly strong and driven by obsessions, and yet insular, separated from the real world by their own internal fantasies. Here we find the rebel hero and the dominating matron side by side with ghosts, the Wandering Jew, and highly mysterious gypsies. However, all of these characters are seen from a distance, even though we are privy to their internal thoughts and ideas, and it is difficult to get emotionally involved with any of them. Not helping in this regard is the extreme similarity of names through various generations of the family, and frequent references to the genealogical chart at the beginning of the book are necessary to try and keep everything straight.
Stylistically, be prepared for page long sentences and sudden multi-page discourses not immediately connected to current happenings. Often this prose is quite beautiful, and at times very effective in painting pictures of some very horrible occurrences in ways that can sear into your brain. Also be fully prepared for the flights of magical realism, when you go from the mundane of everyday to things clearly impossible in ordinary life, items which often highlight by contrast the depth and trivialness of the ordinary.
If you are looking for a straightforward story with normal people, this is not the place to look. If instead you are looking for something very much out of the ordinary, and willing to work to find the core of what's happening, this work can be quite rewarding. It's doubtful if a single reading of this work will expose all of its potential, there is too much buried meaning, symbolism, and metaphor here that needs careful inspection to yield its full treasure. Its themes are not uplifting; futility, the constant of man's inhumanity to others is stark, the repetitiveness of the actions and character types from one generation to the next leads one down the path of asking what purpose does anything have, and the pervasiveness of each individual's necessary isolation from others keeps a dark cloud over the entire work. This is a somber work, with its gold carefully buried, and the reader must be a diligent prospector.
---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One Hundred Years of Solitude, 27 Nov 2008
The best way to describe 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is as an adult fairy tale. What with flying carpets and people living for over 100 years, to name but two of the fantastical elements of this story, you need to suspend disbelief to get the most from this poetic and rich story. Based around the various generations of the Buendia family this book explores the various lives and exploits of each family member. It has a mixture of events that make for interesting stories in their own right and give the book the feel of a short story collection with the same characters and a loose over arching theme to tie it all together. It took me some time to get used to the style, but once I did I found it to be an engrossing and rewarding read. Well worth a look if you like evocative language and vivid imagery and due to the fantasy elements it reminded me of Salman Rishdies 'Satanic Verses' and if you liked that then this is well worth a try. A strong 4 star book.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
best book, 1 Sep 2008
I read this book in about two days, I just couldn't put it down. I cared about the characters, when they were happy I was happy, when they were sad so was I. When I finished the book I spent half an hour looking at the cover, opened it again, started reading and decided I couldn't put myself through all the sad bits again.
A friend who's an English teacher loved it, she read it when she was supervising the mocks. She hated when one of the students needed her attention she didn't want to stop reading.
The only fault this book has is that when I finished it for about six months after any book I started seemed boring. This is my favorite book, I'm still looking for a book better than this but so far none have come close.
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