Scan barcode
A review by emilymknight
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
adventurous
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
Don't be fooled by the punctuation, this novel is basically a story told in one continuous breath.
This novel has been on be TBR list for a while now, and when I saw that there was gonna be a Netflix series adaptation, I knew I needed to make sure I had read it before it came out.
So this novel was NOT what I expected. There is very little dialogue and it is slowwwwww, like so slow. It did pick up a bit about halfway through but for the most part, it was a bit of a slog, by the end I was struggling. I'd heard the family tree was very confusing with a lot of characters having the same names but honestly I didn't think it was that bad - my edition did have a family tree diagram at the start (I'm sure all editions probably do) but I also had a piece of paper that I made notes on, in a way that I understood, it did get very cramped and had a lot of arrows (thanks to the alarmingly high amount of incest) but overall this helped me make sense of it all!
For me, Colonel Aureliano Buendia's generation was the most interesting, then the twin's generation. When it got to Aureliano Segundo's kid's generation, I was losing it a bit. Though it is a slow-paced book, for me the writing flowed with quite a quick pace, so when it got to the last Aureliano, I had to remind myself that well over 100 years (duh, the title) had passed since the start.
The general impression I got, was that through all the generations, it seemed so hectic and chaotic, wars and murder, marital affairs and babies, incest and magic! A woman eats dirt and buries herself, a girl flies to heaven on laundry in the wind, a man shoots himself in the chest and survives, a man is tied up to a chesnut tree for decades, oh and did I mention, INCEST. But when a character died, it all just seemed to slow right down, it was more reflective and there was a common theme of the characters thinking of the ones they loved right before death. And at the very end of the novel too, when it all kind of tied up together, it just seemed so... quiet, almost like a fever dream, like wow, that all just happened, and here we are, at the end.
This novel has been on be TBR list for a while now, and when I saw that there was gonna be a Netflix series adaptation, I knew I needed to make sure I had read it before it came out.
So this novel was NOT what I expected. There is very little dialogue and it is slowwwwww, like so slow. It did pick up a bit about halfway through but for the most part, it was a bit of a slog, by the end I was struggling. I'd heard the family tree was very confusing with a lot of characters having the same names but honestly I didn't think it was that bad - my edition did have a family tree diagram at the start (I'm sure all editions probably do) but I also had a piece of paper that I made notes on, in a way that I understood, it did get very cramped and had a lot of arrows (thanks to the alarmingly high amount of incest) but overall this helped me make sense of it all!
For me, Colonel Aureliano Buendia's generation was the most interesting, then the twin's generation. When it got to Aureliano Segundo's kid's generation, I was losing it a bit. Though it is a slow-paced book, for me the writing flowed with quite a quick pace, so when it got to the last Aureliano, I had to remind myself that well over 100 years (duh, the title) had passed since the start.
The general impression I got, was that through all the generations, it seemed so hectic and chaotic, wars and murder, marital affairs and babies, incest and magic! A woman eats dirt and buries herself, a girl flies to heaven on laundry in the wind, a man shoots himself in the chest and survives, a man is tied up to a chesnut tree for decades, oh and did I mention, INCEST. But when a character died, it all just seemed to slow right down, it was more reflective and there was a common theme of the characters thinking of the ones they loved right before death. And at the very end of the novel too, when it all kind of tied up together, it just seemed so... quiet, almost like a fever dream, like wow, that all just happened, and here we are, at the end.
"He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most."
"Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvellous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that whatever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end."