Book Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)

by Tristan D.

I stretched back in a beach chair and dug my feet into the sand, reached
over to the blanket where my father slept and picked up
the newly-bought book. I spent ten minutes scratching off the "Oprah's
Book Club" sticker and rubbing off the stubborn residue that it
left behind, wondering why a Nobel-Prize-winning novel needed Oprah's
stamp of approval before people bought it. But anyway.

The book was Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,
and two days after I bought it from the Browseabout bookstore on a
lazy Rehoboth Avenue in mid-June, I am happy to say that it is one of
the most powerful things that I have ever read.

It is of just the right weight and flexibility for a paperback, and
has a smell of seashells and salt-wind that adds to the magical realism
pioneered by Márquez's words. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the
story of six generations of the family of José Arcadio Buendía, the
founder of a mythical town called Macondo. I was half-way through the
novel before I realized that Macondo was located in Colombia—the name
of the country is never referred to, and Márquez's descriptions leave
the reader with an impression of a landscape that is so timeless and
familiar that its exact location in the world of reality is difficult
to place.

This is a story of characters, of human beings whose inner beauty and
ugliness drive them through a world of Colombian history and human
mythology. Each one is recognizable and unique—despite the endless
repetition of the same names across the generations—and I fell in love
with each of them, even when I had to hate them. There were moments of
tragedy where Márquez demands that we laugh, and moments of joy where
he demands that we ache. It is an intensely realistic story populated
by lost ghosts, prophetic gypsies, and thirty-two failed rebellions
all led by the same silversmith. It is filled with all the
contradictions and absurdities of real life, which only serve to make
it more powerful and life-changing, and I strongly recommend that you
go out and buy this book.

The New York Times Book Review perhaps said it best: "One Hundred
Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of
Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It
takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the
air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more
lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of
novelists, let alone one man…Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less
than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,
meaningful, and meaningless in life." You will be changed. Promise.