Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Buendia family are a doomed lot, all of their grand plans always seem to come to nothing or, more often than not, end badly. Filled with magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of generations of the family and the time they spend in a small settlement with limited contact with the outside world. 

I purchased a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude because it was one of those books. You know the kind. It constantly appears on lists with titles like Books You must Read Before You Die and is one that many authors and avid readers seem to mention in interviews. Apart from that, I knew little of the story. Consequently, the first quarter dragged quite a bit. Initially I made the false assumption that the actions of the Buendia family was a metaphor for human nature, but some of the themes started to feel a bit too oddly specific and I finally caught on that the author was, in fact, discussing Columbian history. After that, it felt more like the kind of book that a slightly out of sorts English Lecturer would set for the specific purposes of infuriating their students. (Did I ever tell you about the time one of my English Lecturers set Holden's Performance for one of my classes? The same Lecturer later set Possession and admitted in a tutorial that he'd skipped most of the poetry. But, I digress ...)

One Hundred Years of Solitude is overlong, infuriating and yet strangely interesting. The themes of incest disgusted me and I'm a little bamboozled by the authors need to include some of the events in such detail, but as a metaphor for people who are doomed it seems to work well enough. Much of the readers enjoyment will derive from their ability and willingness to laugh at or with the characters and their absurd situations without feeling too disgusted or sorry for them.

Recommended, but keep a strong drink by your side as you read.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more