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One Hundred Years of Solitude: Awarded the Premio Romulo Gallegos 1972 (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – August 31, 2000
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Classics
- Publication dateAugust 31, 2000
- Dimensions8.5 x 5.43 x 1.02 inches
- ISBN-10014118499X
- ISBN-13978-0141184999
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Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (August 31, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 014118499X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0141184999
- Item Weight : 11.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.5 x 5.43 x 1.02 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #597,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,880 in Travel Duffel Bags
- #3,322 in Magical Realism
- #15,205 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) was born in Colombia and was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. His many works include The Autumn of the Patriarch; No One Writes to the Colonel; Love in the Time of Cholera and Memories of My Melancholy Whores; and a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Gregory Rabassa (born 9 March 1922) is a prominent literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Top reviews from the United States
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The story involves six generations of one family, established by Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, who also helped found the town of Macondo, in the lowlands of Columbia, though the country is never specifically identified. The in-breeding (and also out-breeding) in this one family is simply astonishing. I can't remember if the original edition had a genealogical chart at the beginning, but this one does, and it provides an invaluable reference in keeping the philanderings, and the subsequent progeny, straight, particularly since numerous individuals over the generations have the same name. What is the "Scarlet Letter" that is prophesized for a family with such a high degree of consanguinity? That a child will be born with a pig's tail.
Marquez dazzles the reader with the intensity of his writing; it's as though he had a 1600 page book in him, but is given a 400 page limit. It is the furious sketching of a street artist, making every line count in a portrait. The strengths, follies, and interactions of the men and women are depicted in memorable events. And there seems to be a realistic balance and development of his characters. Marquez is also the master of segue, from one event to the other, and from one generation to another, with his characters moving from swaddling clothes, on to adulthood, and then into their decrepitude.
From my first reading, I had remembered Rebeca, with her "shameful" addiction to eating dirt. First time around, I chalked it up to Marquez's "magical realism," since no one really ate dirt. Several years later I learned that it is a wide-spread medical problem, often driven by a mineral deficiency that the person is trying to remediate. The author also describes the disease of insomnia which was spread to Macondo, with an accompanying plague of forgetfulness. Magical realism, or the forgetfulness of the "now" generation that has lost the stories of the past?
Establishing the time period comes slowly. Marquez mentions Sir Frances Drake, but he is in the unspecified past. It is only when a family portrait is taken, as a daguerreotype photo, that one realizes it must be in the 1840's-50's, with six generations to go. There are a multitude of themes: since this IS Latin America, Marquez has the obligatory gringos and their banana plantations (alas, all too true); there is endless, senseless war, with the two sides eventually unable to state what they are fighting for, except, of course, the war itself; there are the women who drive men crazy with their beauty, and there is the spitefulness of women to each other (alas, again, the "sisterhood'); there is economic development, and a worker's revolt, and the use of other members of the same class, but in uniform, who repress it; there is the role of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and even a family member who would be Pope and there are unflinching portrayals of the aging process, alas, to the third power.
On the re-read, I noticed a portion of the novel that was much further developed in Innocent Erendira: and Other Stories (Perennial Classics) . Also nestled in the book was an important reference: "Taken among them were Jose Arcadio Segundo and Lorenzo Gavilan, a colonel in the Mexican revolution, exiled in Macondo, who said that he had been witness to the heroism of his comrade Artemio Cruz." Checking Marquez bio, he has been a long-time friend of Carlos Fuentes, slipped this reference in 100 years, which is an omen for me, since I was considering re-reading Fuentes marvelous The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel (FSG Classics) And in terms of omens, redux even, do future travel plans include meeting another character in the book, the Queen of Madagascar?
I recently had dinner with a woman who had been Ambassador to one of the Latin American countries. Spanish is her native language, and she still reads some of the Latin American writers in Spanish to "keep her language skills up." As for "100 years," she had read it four times, each time in English. It's a record I am unlikely to repeat, but this novel, which honors the Nobel Prize with its name, could use a third read, if I am granted enough time. It ages well, sans decrepitude, and provided much more meaning the second time around. 6-stars.
Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2024
The author, Gabriel García Márquez, uses magical realism to communicate the physical reaction of events by ways of the natural world. Magical realism is a literary device that in the book is displayed as a natural occurrence that the characters accept but us the reader interprets it as a phenomenon and is baffled as to why it seems normal. In 100 Years of Solitude magical realism is used in many different instances, and the majority of those instances have to do with the balance of nature. After the deaths of the workers on the banana plantation, it rains continuously for five years and the civilians think normally of it (Márquez 315). The rain symbolizes the washing away of the memories of the people and their troubled pasts. Márquez emphasizes this by using realism to convey an obvious difference that the reader notices to inflict an over exaggeration that helps convey the importance of that particular event. An unnatural occurrence in the human life is reciprocated by a representation of this as an unnatural occurrence in nature. Another literary device used in this novel is symbolism. There is an instance where after José Arcadio Buendía’s death they are measuring his coffin and yellow flowers begin to fall out of nowhere from the sky. José had just died and the city is preparing for his funeral. At first I assumed that they were talking about a few petals that blew past a window, but the flows are later described as a blanket and covering the streets (Márquez 140). The flowers aren’t just any that are falling from the sky, but they are yellow, a symbol of light. Flowers are also used to honor the dead so having huge masses fall from the sky represents the heavens sending a message to his family and friends of his return to heaven. These grand gestures are both approved by the citizens of Macondo, thus both are examples of magical realism, but one could argue that both of these scenes could represent symbolism. When magical realism is implemented, it means that the author is trying to convey a significant importance about that scene in a symbolic way. The rain is a symbol of mourning and because it rained for five years it represents a huge loss to the city. The flowers are a symbol of recognition and pride so having hundreds of thousands of flowers fall from the heavens is magical in it’s self but also represents the peaceful passing into heaven.
This was a fascinating book that got me thinking but also confused me which is what I assume Márquez wanted from this novel. The book often switches between different points in time, fast forwards though time, uses magical realism, makes me as a reader question the intent of his writing, and frustrates me through the motif of not learning from past mistakes. This crazy book is challenging, interesting, and funny. I recommend this book to any 16 year old that wants to challenge themselves with a complicated read and definitely to 18-19 year olds to help them prepare for reading challenging material in college. This is a great read for anyone that chooses to challenge themselves, but that being said I am never able to read anything very challenging with other big stresses, to-dos, and due dates in my life, so being a student and having to understand the book and study for finals was a bit challenging to do at the same time, because I couldn’t focus on the book as much as I would have liked during that time period. I appreciate the challenge and confusion that Márquez has written but there were some points of the book that was a bit too confusing, for example the names. I believe that the confusion between the names is what Márquez had intended because of the meaning and message that each of the names add to the character’s life and personality, but eventually I gave up trying to remember who was who. This gives me an excuse to re-read the book with maybe a different perspective and focus next time. Overall this is a challenging read for people that love to read. This book requires the reader to have the time to dig deep into the book and try to analyze any literary devices that seem important to the overall theme(s) of the novel.
Márquez, Gabriel G. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Print.
delivers madness, humor,
tragedy.
The Buendia line is just a strand of
humanity as we may recognize it.
We are made to realize that as humans we may all begin alike and that we may all come to the same end, but what occurs between these seminal events is as strange as magic.
Top reviews from other countries
A shame, because this is one of the richest, most dense, detailed, dreamlike, formalist, symbolic, mysterious, magical, funny - I had some good laughs, and some nightmares! – pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Painting equivalents? The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, Guernica, The Persistence of Memory might give one some idea of the level of detail – not necessarily content – one’s in for.
There are twenty-four main protagonists agonising over seven generations of the BUENDIA family in this intense stylish saga which more or less coincides with the crackly political and social history of Colombia between the years 1820 and 1920.
Unsurprisingly the plot is baffling. Its weave is not unlike that of a Wilton carpet, so instead of 'U' shaped yarns, the fibre is woven all the way through the carpet and then sheared to create a range of cut and loop textures. Every so often characters pop up to the surface, having travelled invisibly under the substrate for scores of pages, and years. Sometimes without any apparent explanation, build or lead in. The reader might be forgiven in thinking that s/he had one foot in a William Burroughs cut-and-paste text and the other in a David Bowie lyric. It might cause annoyance to a convergent thinker, but just relax and enjoy passages such as; ‘when he asked for the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen on this earth, all the women brought him their daughters. He became lost in misty byways, in figures reserved for oblivion, in the labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one’s thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages.’
But there’s much more than the apparently ‘cut-and-paste’ plot. Here are just some of the themes and symbols which go fuguing away throughout the narrative; gold, ice, buried treasure, death – particularly by firing squad, the death of birds flying into things, incest, the invisibility of people, cannibalism, and of course solitude. There are curious repeat mentions of anointings, lye, chamber pots, small candy animals, gypsies, macaws, small golden fishes, the drawing of chalk circles, begonias and the requirement – or not, a political reference – to paint one’s house either blue or red.
So, I leave you with a few further almost edible Marquezian phrases; ‘more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his,’ or ‘solitude had made a selection in her memory, and had burned the nostalgic piles of dimming waste that life had accumulated in her heart,’ or how about, ‘the journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem’? But perhaps we should attribute at least some of this tickly prose to Gregory Rabassa his translator?
I read it in full, and was simply amazed and blown me away by its sheer quality and style.
And don't be driven away by the fact that it is a classic. Most people find most classics boring and unenjoyable. I didn't enjoy Jane Austen's works or Great Gatsby. But this is a master-class novel and you will enjoy the story of it, too.
Even if someone scratched away all the style and storytelling and plainly communicated the story to you, you would fall in love with it.
It is a literary masterpiece and extremely enjoyable at the same time.