Wow. I did not love [b:One Hundred Years of Solitude|320|One Hundred Years of Solitude|Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1327881361s/320.jpg|3295655], but *this* I loved. The writing is just stunning, haunting, beautiful, fluid. It flows like a river. Total genius. I have no idea about Márquez's method - did he map out the structure of the story, or did it just emerge this way? It certainly feels like the latter to me, and that's a big part of why I am so amazed. Every turn of the narrative finds a purpose that I am not sure could have been foreseen, even by the writer. The chronological tiling is incredibly subtle and powerful, giving the story plenty of warp and weft, filling the whole thing with space and breath. I can't even describe it, of course. The characters are not "fully formed", which is how I have expressed that I like them to be, but this is no defect. They are all terrifically well developed on certain dimensions and remain totally ineffable on others, everyone with their secret spaces, many of them not in the least admirable but all of them not only understandable, but somehow entailed by the parts the author does show us. We can't see the secret spaces, we know they're there, but somehow we can understand something about them, and we certainly appreciate their necessity, the necessity that we just can't know them.

Wow again - what a masterpiece. This is just a tremendous accomplishment, a book I think I will always be glad to have read.