“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is an absolutely amazing novel! It feels like all the essence of Latin American magical realism accumulated in this famed work of one of my all-time favorite authors – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Despite featuring a complicated set of related characters across multiple generations, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” still managed to enchant and captivate me.
I was deeply invested in the story from the first few sentences that I read. There was something about the way Marquez made use of the magical realism element that was not only charming, but also essential in portraying the tragedy that the Buendia family had to suffer from. There were a lot of characters that shared the same names, but I never for once got baffled by this similarity throughout the story. I could clearly distinguish between different people named Aureliano, José Arcadio or Remedios, since the author was very adept at creating them with such distinctive features in appearance and characters.
What I may have forgotten sometimes was how each character died. That’s why I found myself turning back some pages and reading some details again just to figure that out, but that was not the big problem for me. How can reading again some parts in a novel in which everything was MARVELOUS and stylishly polished be a problem anyway?
Like the title suggests, each and everyone in this novel, especially the people from the Buendia family, or the people who were related to this family through marriage, suffered from solitude the minute they existed in Macondo. It was as if an enormous amount of solitude had been absorbed into the story like a bubble, and finally, it burst into million pieces of sorrow and tragic feeling that still haunted the readers after the last sentence of the novel was read. But that sorrow and solitude was not portrayed as sentimental or tear-jerking as in other (romance) novels. It was sadness and loneliness, of course, but depicted in a polished but rustic way. Words alone cannot fully describe this unique sentiment that this novel evoked.
Overall, I’m glad that I got the chance to read this timeless classic masterpiece and was able to appreciate the story as a whole. I highly recommend this book to everyone, whether you love reading magical realism or not, since this is truly a literary work that no one should miss in their life.
Final verdict: 10/10, because how can I rate this masterpiece by Gabriel Garcia Marquez differently?
Little Corner of My Mind 