One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a bizarre, but enjoyable read. I enjoyed the magical aspects that give the world a bit of spice while also playing an important part in the inner workings of the town. I enjoyed the explanation for Melquiadez’s room where time could “splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room” (348). I like that as an explanation for the state of the town. The rain lasted far longer than any rain should, and I feel like that was when time had splintered off for the entire town. From then on, Macondo just became a ghost town with a few residents still left.

There was a much larger focus on nostalgia in the second half of the book. However, as much as the characters reminisced about the past, things weren’t as great as they remembered it being. When you remember something, it always seems better than it actually was. I feel like that’s the way a lot of us think about our childhood, from shows to music to just life in general. Of course, were they actually better back then? I don’t know, but that’s just the way memory works.

I really enjoyed the emphasis on the cyclical nature of the family and the town. It reminds me of another one of my favorite series Wheel of Time with the focus on time repeating and new periods coming and going. It was interesting to read through a whole “cycle” of time (that wasn’t 14 books long) and seeing how the inhabitants of the town slowly forgot their past, returning to the beginning again. The naming conventions were also a very effective way to show how the family could never move on, continuously naming their children after their ancestors and also always ending up with other family members. And Ursula’s fear finally coming true at the very end was a neat touch. The ending wrapped up the story nicely, completing the Buendia family arc and answering my question about the title of the book. The entire family lived in solitude, both in the sense that the town was isolated from the rest of the world (even with the brief banana plantation) and in the sense that the characters themselves were isolated from each other. There never really seemed to be true connection between characters any more than lust or hatred or just because they were family. The parchments being only 100 years old though confuses me about the whole timeline of events because I would’ve sworn that more than 100 years had passed, but it could just be the nature of the storytelling itself. Overall, I surprisingly enjoyed the book even though it was a little confusing and weird at times.

(Justice for Gaston. Did not deserve what happened to him. I don’t know how I would react if my wife cheated on me with her nephew (?) but I’d need therapy.)

Question:
Do you agree that this should be “required reading for the entire human race?” (as a New York Times book review said)