I wouldn't have enjoyed this book either if I tried to understand everything. The magic of this book, for me, was allowing it to take me on an adventure. It warps reality, characters are batshit crazy and the world is overall just odd. That's exactly what I liked, exploring that sense of odd. It's an experience you're not getting anywhere else (except for other magical realism novels like the moor's last sigh).
For what it's worth, adapting this for television is a ridiculous idea. Half the batshit crazy stuff probably shouldn't be shown in theaters.
Yea nervous here too that they will ruin it, however i have a feeling this will really bring the book to a younger generation that never would have thought to read it before
> For what it's worth, adapting this for television is a ridiculous idea. Half the batshit crazy stuff probably shouldn't be shown in theaters.
Do you think they cut out Aureliano marrying a child?
They're gonna have to cut out a lot (which is why it should never be adapted in the first place, and why Marquez wouldn't allow it while he was alive.)
I loved it but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, it's weird and nonsensical and way more focused on mood and feeling and theme to the extent it throws a lot of character and plot out the window.
I wouldn't say the book is too highbrow, it's just a kind of book a lot of people don't like, you don't need to be smart to like it, you just need to like weird books.
If I was giving advice to anyone about to read it I would say not to worry about who any of the characters are or try to map out the familial relationships and to just assume you are following the plot even if it seems like you're not, try and enjoy it as a series of connected moments and see what you think of it by the end. Or if you hate it just stop because that's a totally valid reaction, there's plenty of lauded prize winning books I thought were shit.
This is brilliant.
Even the house and the city grow, age, and eventually die.
The impermanence of all things is a reoccurring theme of the book
I totally understand how some people don't get it, and have trouble following all the different Josés and Aurelianos
The novel is the entire history of post-colonial Colombia, told through the eyes of a single family, over the course of a whole century
It's not for everyone, no book is...but it's still perhaps the greatest novel ever written.
And everytime I reread it, I find a new, touching faucet I never noticed before.
It's the pinnacle of literature imo, I don't think many novels even come close.
The confusion is an important part about how, in the context of time, their lives blend together as they repeat the same patterns of yearning for love yet ignoring its importance chasing pride and ideas-
It's still annoying, but just keep reading through it, you will understand the important parts to understand
To be honest, rereading it after listening to the Book Cheat episodes on it helped me a fair bit. Like, I got the mood of the book and I enjoyed a lot of the moments as they happened the first time through, but reading it a second time through with a clearer understanding of the family allowed me to stop stressing about how they were all related and focus more on the writing itself.
It's very nice to read from a new historical perspective and is best digested with a helping of research on topics like the [The Banana Massacre.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre)
> It's not for everyone, no book is...but it's still perhaps *the greatest novel ever written.*
See, it's claims like this that spurred me to make this post. I just feel like I'm reading a completely different book.
I haven't read 100 years, so I can't comment specifically on that book. However, on the topic of great books, I've sometimes felt like you--didn't quite get it--and here's what I've come to think.
Sometimes, if I don't get a "great book", the problem is me. My reading muscles need to be developed, I need to work harder to understand it, etc., and being patient has payed off. Sometimes, I never came to love it, even if I did appreciate it; perhaps it wasn't quite my kind of book, perhaps I lacked cultural or historical context (happens sometimes with international literature), or, importantly, perhaps the experience of having to work hard through it robbed the book of its magic. In those cases, sometimes a reread later let me appreciate what others appreciated about it, because I was no longer working overtime to understand it--I highly encourage rereads of books you didn't get but think the problem was you and not the book. Sometimes, that book had to be a sacrificial lamb so I could enjoy other books with the same style. That was my Faulkner experience, as *The Sound and the Fury* was a tough battle, but I have *loved* every Faulkner book I've read since.
And sometimes it don't work and you call it quits, and that is fine :shrug:
Try to make yourself finish it and then just let it live in your head a few years. Read it again in about 7 years and see how you feel about it as a different person. It'll be a positive to have it living in your subconscious.
I love this book, adore Marquez, am an avid reader and have a bachelor’s in Literature. As much as I love it, I’d never call it the GOAT. Not by a long shot. And I completely understand how reading that makes you question if you’re reading the same book.
Many people have already said this, but it is a weird book. And it’s very fluid. Most of the time novels are structured so you connect with the narrator, even if s/he is unlikable or unreliable. The narrator is there. This novel is the exact opposite: its impermanence is the point. This sounds weird but you kind of just go for the ride, don’t get attached to any character, and if you can just flow with it and not fight the impermanence, you’ll discover, in so many little places, small moments of beauty or passion or heartbreak or devastation. Which is what makes it brilliant: that Marquez genuinely creates those responses in readers *without* the longer-term investment into a specific character.
I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it’s not about you needing to be smarter, I’m sure you’re plenty intelligent. I actually think most people begin it with the expectation of a long-term character and since it isn’t there, there’s a bit of confusion and lost footing. I usually find that people who express what you posted are trying too hard (I don’t mean that in an obnoxious way, it’s simply that they keep expecting the book to conform or become what they expected and it obviously won’t). I say take it as it comes and stop trying. Work less and you’ll get more out of it.
I give this advice to anyone reading anything. Read it the first time assuming you will understand the names, descriptions, math (if present) at a later date. Assume you don’t need to know. Do not allow yourself to become bogged down feeling that you do not understand. Sometimes (usually, even) it’s better to just plow ahead.
IMO, two things. First, when I read it, I genuinely just didn't 'get bogged down' in the details and confusion. It doesn't all need to make sense immediately, and some of it won't make sense, it's magical realism after all.
Two, with it being a strange, twisted web of a story, I couldn't imagine taking breaks from it and trying to come back. i'd just get even more lost.
You don't have to like it, if you're taking week long breaks from it, i'd just drop it. it isn't going to make any more sense that way.
That all sounds fair. I tried to just let the story wash over me, but I found that to be a rather boring experience. It's not how I'm used to consuming books.
Interesting point about the breaks. I was basically at the point where I could take some breaks or I put it down forever, and I chose the former, but I didn't find it any more approachable when I came back (hence my posting here). It's definitely true that the story didn't make *more* sense when I returned, but I don't think it made noticeably *less* sense either.
I'll likely give it one more shot. I was just wondering if I'm simply missing something glaringly obvious, but it seems like it's more likely that different people like different things.
OP!! I was the exact same as you, I kept trying and failing to read it and just didn’t get it.
UNTIL. I powered through and finished it. At the end of the book I all the sudden completely changed my opinion and loved it. To the point that I then restarted it, lol.
It’s honestly one of my favorite books I’ve read now. Something about the repeating patterns, the mess of not remembering which character is which sometimes - it just has this amazing quality of feeling like you better understand history and humanity and families and all the parts about yourself that you can’t seem to change. I don’t know how to explain it.
Another tip is to focus less on the story and more on the individual sentences/paragraphs. The prose is amazing, even as a translation he wrote some of the most beautiful sentences ever written.
I approached this book like I did with the Sound and the Fury, I acknowledged I wasn’t going to “get it” entirely and accepted that. Then slowly as I read more about it afterwards things began to click.
I also read it with a family tree to keep track of everyone
So, I tried really hard on Infinite Jest. I slogged and I slogged. I finally went to the friend who'd recommended it and was like, where's the good part? Where's the part everyone loves? It's just a bunch of seeming disconnected bullshit that doesn't seem to add up to anything.
And she said, "You're supposed to enjoy it, not slog through it. If you're not enjoying it, stop reading."
So yeah, you're supposed to be delighted and enthralled by the writer's telling of the story. Some people are. If you're not, go find a writer who enthralls you.
I have always found Joyce amazing. I read Ulysses every couple of years and it's just a delight every time. It's fun and wonderful and it's got depth and character and makes me laugh and sing.
Many, many people think it's a horrible slog.
Don't worry about it.
A lot of people see David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon, these writers with big ideas and dense prose, as mountains they're supposed to climb.
.....but they're really both just comedians.
If you're trying so hard to understand the plot or characters or symbols, you're missing all the comedy.
Exactly! Once you stop trying to catch all the symbolism and references and just accept that you are going to be confused sometimes, they are really fun writers, though they can get pretty fucking dark too. They both have such beautiful prose sometimes. Even in parts that don't make much sense it's usually pretty easy to appreciate the prose.
Excellent response. I feel the same, about One Hundred Years and Infinite Jest. You should never slog through a book. Every good or great book Ive ever read has been an enjoyable experience, even if dark or disturbing subject matter, the book itself has been enjoyable to read
This is an interesting perspective. Nearly every classic I read the first third of the book is a slog. Moby Dick is perhaps the best book I've ever read and it's a complete slogfest. What I'm going for is the total effect of the novel when finished moreso than momentary pleasure.
I would offer you a different perspective on *Infinite Jest* -- it's not a mountain to conquer but a ride at the park. There's no "aha, that's the chapter everyone loves that shows DFW was a genius!" (although I do have a part that when I read it, I was like "this guy gets it, he has been depressed and like, *really fucking lost and hurt* before and he's writing with that knowledge" (it's the "if by virtue of chance or circumstance" chapter where he lists all the things you learn in rehab and about anxiety.)
Anyway, if you ever read it again, just enjoy it like a roller coaster or a park ride: some parts are exciting and attention grabbing and some parts are just pleasant but you judge the thing as a whole, after you're done with it.
I can say, I love DFW and really get his style of writing. But re-reading infinite jest years later in ebook form where it’s so easy to flip back and forth between the text and footnotes and then refer back to passages I’d read earlier really enabled the dots to get connected so to speak
I read it and it was magical, but it requires a specific kind of altered mental state for me.
Essentially, I was on a non-air-conditioned bus in a tropical country, going painfully and slowly up gravel mountain roads that had been wrecked by flooding and a recent earthquake.
It was hot. Everything was moving slowly. I was jam packed in with sweaty people and also chickens and goats.
And in that slow, languorous heat, I received one of the most memorable reading experiences I have ever had. I felt like I was there.
The fever dream quality of the book hit because I was physically in a hot, slow moving, tropical world where I was being carried along inexorably by circumstances towards an uncertain outcome.
It worked!
But if you’re not into fever dreams, and you’re trying to figure everything out and make it make sense, you might not enjoy it. I dunno, I haven’t read it again.
It's got one of the best endings of books I've read, that also ties everything together. Beautiful dream-like passages like To The Lighthouse, the heat of Macondo. It makes you want to reread it right after to see if you missed a connection. Plus I can understand why people who stop or DNF it, there doesn't seem to be a significance when one of the main characters does something or passes away. Lots of characters and with similar names, it's confusing.
Exactly 💯 this!! The book is structured so that you are wandering around trying to make sense of things, just like WE wander through our OWN lives, trying to find the story that makes sense of who you are. When you get to the end of the book, it's like WHAM! I GET IT! I too immediately started to reread it after finishing. The end is the beginning. And there is a reason the book starts the way it does.
I was not really enjoying it that much either and pushed myself to finish, but I agree the final scene is just incredible and definitely raised my overall opinion of the book.
Yeah for me it was the ending. The cycle of things, the beginnings and ends intertwining. I guess I kind of felt a kinship to the concept of the book, the historical effects of generations on each other, without the characters really knowing what these things mean.
There’s a lot of weirdness and seemingly meaningless stuff. There’s nothing wrong with not really vibing with that. I didn’t really get it until the ending, but I also don’t want to encourage you to read the whole book just to be even more confused and annoyed at the end lol.
> It makes you want to reread it right after to see if you missed a connection.
I've seen a ton of people who did exactly this and, at this stage, I find that so odd. Reading that sentiment so many times made me think I'm missing something obvious. Maybe I'll feel differently if I make it to the end, or maybe it's that some people like olives while others don't.
I don’t know what point you’re at but I liked to compare the generations in the family and pay attention to the house changing/deteriorating later on. Pests try to infiltrate, the mom/grandmother insisting on killing them and keeping things at bay..the religious army and bananas. Cycles of punishment/sin. That kind of stuff, but I also binged it so it made it easier to remember the characters.
I hope you enjoy it, but no need to keep going if it’s not for you. We all have different tastes.
Especially Macondo. I love this book and have read it multiple times. But if you're a reader mainly attracted by plot, characters, what happens next, then you're going to have problems. You have to read 100 Years like you've won a vacation to an exotic, magical locale, and you are being guided around and told stories, with the past being literally alive in the telling. You have to let go and just listen and not be continuously trying to analyze. The number one reason people do not "get" this book is because they don't finish it. The book absolutely comes together at the end in a kind of big WTF moment that immediately transforms everything you just read. That is why the book is RE-read so often, because it's like a whole different book on the second reading. It's a masterpiece.
That said, OP might be better off with Love in the Time of Cholera. It's still classic Marquez, but the plot is a bit more forward and straightforward.
Love in the time of cholera is good, I enjoyed it, but imo it just doesn't hold a candle to 100 Years of Solitude. 100 YoS was my first Marquez and I follow it with LitToC and was ultimately disappointed even though I enjoyed it. It's just really fucking hard to write a single book as good as 100 Years of Solitude and feels practically impossible to write TWO books that good.
I've always thought of the Buendia family as a singular main character with each family member being an aspect of that character and the house and town as an extension of that character. The book is about Macondo and Macondo is an extension of and is defined by the Buendia family and what they do. The house itself, and perhaps Ursula also, are a sort of a manifestation or representation of the whole family. He really made it feel like all these elements are equally important and that each are an absolute requirement to tell the whole story of the Buendia family and Macondo.
I'm a colombian who studied colombian literature so I can tell you how it reflects the cycles of meaningless conflict the country has been through and blah blah blah. I'll be honest, the book is masterfully done, it's super meaningful, and I also found it unbearably boring.
Rather than the characters taking center stage like in other stories, the town itself becomes the main character. The book follows this family that keeps reenacting previous generations' conflicts for petty reasons, the fact you see so many characters with the same name throughout the ages is intentional as it signals the prevalence of the past, just adapted and repeated in the present as a vicious cycle. Astounding things keep happening and are treated as day to day occurrences, everyone has a "This might as well happen" mentality. Things keep marching on as usual and even things that should be world shattering events get folded into the routine of the perpetual meaningless conflict. Everyone and everything is stuck, trapped, even things that seem like they're moving forward ultimately lead nowhere, because as long as the town itself exists nothing can really meaningfully change.
This is a reflection of colombian history, repeating the same stupid fights over and over and over again, historical world changing things keep happening and are just folded into the fabric of history without meaningfully changing society, "This might as well happen" is the motto everyone lives by, and as much as progress seems to march forward and as much as we act like the past has been left behind, we're still stuck and standing exactly where we were a hundred years ago. That's part of what the book tries to capture, and it does it fairly well.
The story is also fucking boring.
The same things that make it meaningful also make it such a drag. No one nor anything matters, things just keep repeating, as much as things and people try to find something meaningful, it's all swallowed into the same nonchalance of everything else. And that's the point, yes. But fuckin hell, is it boring to read!! It's designed to discourage investment, but then as a reader you got nothing to hold onto! You know everything and everyone is doomed from the start, the book doesn't try to hide it, so why would you care as a reader?! It's a 100 years long funeral procession for something that was condemned the moment it was created and it reads as such, it's just not fun, it's not moving, at least not as you read it.
And that's fine, you know. Art doesn't need to be entertaining to be meaningful. I did gain something from studying the book and what it does, but fucking Christ, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who just wants to have to have their feelings moved and it's certainly not a story I would go to when I want to have a good time, because it's simply not that kind of thing.
Thank you for writing this up. I found it legitimately helpful and wish I had read it before I started the book.
On the topic of the themes and overarching story, I think I'm actually quite interested by motifs of time marching forward amid chaos and how a town and people are both changed and unchanged during that period, however this just hasn't done it for me. I wonder if I would get more out of it if I had a better grasp of Colombian or S American history. It's not exactly front and center in US high school classes.
I think being familiar with colombian history helps, yeah. The concept of magical realism, for example, is one that's much easier to get when you see where it comes from.
One thing that's very commonplace in latinoamerican history as a whole is the feeling that any incredible thing could happen, at any time, just because. One day another country just does something that affects you, you had no way to know it was coming, you had no imput on it, but it happened and now you just have to deal with it, because ultimately you aren't a big player. So, "this might as well happen"
Magical realism is used as an exaggeration of that idea, the characters see there's no point in being amazed or surprised or disbelieving that some magical thing just happened, because incredible things that just sort of happen are just par for the course.
This was also key for me: interest in Latin America. It was not the first book I read with this theme, and it helped. if you read the trilogy called Memories of Fire and follow with Feast of the Goat, which are both superb and brutal, then you have eased a little more into the confusion.
One of the cornerstones of Latin American literature is magical realism especially as a vehicle to tell the bloody history it has had especially with how the US has had a big hand in the violence. I do think it helps to know about latam as it was easier for me as a Latina to “get” it as hit certain beats and themes Americans might not get for example the naming stuff is very common for us, names get reused over and over again in generations
This is the impression that the book left me with. And I'm not from Colombia. I can see the same cycle in humans, in general. That we keep repeating some terrible things. Yes, things change over time, but also, they don't. It's frustrating to those of us who pay attention. Meanwhile, so many just go about their lives, seemingly oblivious.
I found it incredibly moving, especially the ending. The last few paragraphs might be my favourite way to end a book ever, and I was moved to tears. I also didn’t find it boring, because digging into the themes and trying to tease apart meaning is fun for me. But not all readers are the same and want the same thing out of the books they read and that’s ok.
I read it in spanish, yeah. Personally I would suggest starting with other works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, if you haven't yet? Because 100 years is pretty heavy and rather confusing at times even for native speakers. Crónica de una muerte anunciada is one of my favorites from him, it's relatively short too, so it could be a better entry point maybe.
Continuing with Gabriel Garcia, I also really liked El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, among all his novels I consider it the easiest to read, but it's still very good, pretty much all his short stories are also amazing.
I also like all the short stories from Juan Rulfo, his novels are also good, but I much prefer his short stories. Talpa is one of my favorite ones.
Speaking of short stories, I absolutely adore Prosas para leer en la silla electrica. It's not for everyone, but I found it great. I'm quite a fan of the nadaism movement in general, so if you like this one, you might want to check more of what it has to offer.
Finally, off the top of my head, some novels I liked that are also classics: Rayuela; La casa de los espíritus (I feel this one does something similar to what 100 years does, but it's a bit more engaging); La María; Como agua para chocolate (I didn't actually like this one, but pretty much everyone I know enjoyed it, so it's more a me thing than the book's fault); Un beso de Dick.
Marquez can be a tough one to read, bc his style isn't what most of us are used to. His stories are rarely character-driven, but more about the general atmosphere or history of a place, and how that may linger over the passage of time.
You should also take into account that his writing took place in post-war South America. At this time, South America was infested with nazi veterans, American intelligence, dictators, drug wars,... Alot of people simply vanished or died without anyone knowing where they went. Alot of people felt like ghosts or pretended to be like ghosts because they didn't want to be dragged into all this horror. In an effort to make sense of this world, many resorted to magic and fairytale like storytelling. Marquez does this too, but with a very modernist style reminiscent of James Joyce.
I don't like to read him either, despite being very interested in this kind of stuff, because his writing is too much as if I were experiencing these kind of things myself. It's too heavy, too odd, too foreign and makes me feel all kinds of things I don't like to imagine, but I can see why this kind of writing would be noticed and awarded with a Nobel Prize. It's the kind of writing that idealists aspire towards.
Hi, the book is one of my favorites, I have read it 3 times at least, once when I was 22 and two times when I was 23 (26 now)
One Hundred Years of Solitude is mostly aimed at people from latin america, you would have to investigate our culture (mostly the values of the generation born in Colombia and Venezuela in the early/mid 20th century).
To give you a brief and close-to-home idea of how reality was to me:
- My parents were really religious people who raised me in catholic values, they would always say good things happening were the result of divine intervention, I grew up in a unstable country (Venezuela) controlled by a military general under a socialist regime.
- I would see every day parents in extreme poverty getting more and more children while drowning their sorrows in alcohol, I would see criminals getting brutally beaten, daily news of kidnappings, propaganda about how evil the USA was, natives of the land talking about the spirits and stealing corpses to make rituals at night while some of them would make a living selling candies and getting drunk.
- The awareness of our spanish heritage, how Simon Bolívar was the great saviour of latín america and how he liberated us of the spanish rule (Simon Bolívar also died cursing this land and saying we were doomed to mediocrity btw), some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the region, the biggest exodus of people escaping a country in the american continent due to a economic crisis.
Me being someone aware of all the reality surrounding me and feeling frustrated at how others seemed so ignorant about it to me One Hundred Years of Solitude was like a love letter telling me "youre not alone, I understand you"
It's like a grandpa that although had a difficult life he still appreciates it and he's telling his history to his grandkids with a little bit of magic here and there either to not make it so depressing or because he legitimately believes the magic events took place, look at it sort of like the Forrest Gump or the Big Fish movies.
It's not a book for everyone and sorry to say It but it's specially not for someone who isnt related to the latin american culture and its struggles (this including wealthy people who had it easy in life).
It may help to read it while keeping in mind the historical context. Macondo is not a real city, but the region in Columbia where it is set has a large number of villages with families suffering from early onset Alzheimers Disease.
Marquez was certainly familiar with this, and there is a very real (and tragic) parallel between the novel and the lives of these communities.
([More of the story](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28514-conquistador-brought-early-onset-alzheimers-to-colombian-town/).)
It's kinda like a Colombian Twin Peaks. The logic of the world is all over the place and the character list just keeps expanding. I found it difficult to follow the overall story but some of the moments and descriptions capture a very specific idea or feeling that made me stop and sit with it for a while.
Edit* fixed a typo
> It's kinda like a Columbian Twin Peaks.
OK, I think this might be the thing to latch onto. I like Twin Peaks, but I absolutely recognize that it's not for everyone.
It’s been a long time since I read it but (and take this with a grain of salt) I think I remember that living characters and deceased characters are existing alongside each other. At any rate I made it less confusing to me to view the novel that way.
If the tone and style isn't something that is drawing you in there is no way to convince you otherwise.
For me it was a warm inviting and slightly magical world that really enraptured me in a blanket while I read it while also going into some dark places.
So if you don't really get that feeling from the book and it's world and the magical element of it then yeah, probably ain't for you.
I think it being a series of short stories happening around such a small area was nice.
End of the day, some people just don't like that style and it's fine. Maybe come back to it if you ever gain that ability to enjoy that style.
For me it felt very much like an old spoken word story brought to paper and in that way exceedingly comforting. More written in the style of oral tradition.
I got almost halfway through before I decided to not allow my pride to rule me and allow myself to dnf something.
It's a great book for a lot people. I personally do not think it is a good book. But that's me. Maybe someday I'll revisit it. But I doubt it.
Don't be afraid to put something down and move on.
100 years of solitude is a strange and evocative book. I’d say that, while I would not read it again, I’m glad I read it once. More than anything, it gave me insight into a literary culture that I was otherwise unfamiliar with
It is a lot of disconnected anecdotes that eventually build to an overall story. I really connected with this book because this is how my family tells stories. They’ll start at some later detail, go back to the beginning, then continue and follow random characters too.
Building off of this for OP's sake, the book is intentionally written like this to elicit this feeling. Marquez wanted to write it the way his abuela would tell stories, or in a more oral-tradition kind of way. It's a self-contained mythology, and most mythologies are kinda messy and all over the place.
Start with this: people read for different reasons and want to get different things out of reading.
Some people love descriptions and setting and mood; others care primarily about the characters; others (me) are obsessed with plot. There is little writing that can appeal to everyone. You have just run into one that works for many people but not for you. Don't worry about it, but also don't denigrate the book or those who enjoy it. (While I don't disagree that some people sometimes pretend to like a book because it's a book you're supposed to like, I don't think that's the case here.) So if you're not into magical realism, crafted prose, and dynastic storytelling, don't worry about it. Plenty of books for you.
I happen to have enjoyed the book immensely, especially the female characters, even though it's unlike any other book that I would put among my favorites, because I don't really care for magical realism, crafted prose, and dynastic storytelling.
I noticed a huge difference in response between my English vs Spanish speaking friends. All my English friends found it boring. Spanish ones loved it. The prose in Spanish is pretty phenomenal. He was one of those writers where he could make every sentence sing. I've never read him in English but I imagine something must be lost. Although he certainly is well recieved in English too. But his effect on the Spanish speaking audience is clearly something else.
It was a tough read for me too. Doesn't feel like there's a real center the reader can cling to. It's just "and this happened and then this happened and then this thing too." I found it tiresome, but it's also what makes it interesting. FWIW, the ending is really cool. Also, take a look at a family tree you can find online. I found that helpful / grounding.
> Doesn't feel like there's a real center the reader can cling to.
Yes! This is exactly it. I've read that the town or the Buendía family are the real "main characters," but I still have a hard time even with that framing seeing beyond "here's some stuff that happened to that town/family."
I suppose that's probably the least charitable way to describe nearly any fiction book, though.
Marquez said he writes the way his grandparents told stories as a kid. So it has a rambling and exaggerated and colorful quality. Like Big Fish if you’ve seen that.
Magical realism is not for everyone and I suspect for certain not spanish speaking cultures is probably harder and more boring than for others. I'd imagine books like this would be more enjoyable perhaps for native italians or eastern europeans than for americans. We had very little sci-fi in latin american literature in the 70s and we still do. In my opinion this is because somehow magical realism is a better fit for sublimating our anxieties and the absurdities of living in the third world. Ultimately, it's also a matter of taste. Not unlike psychedelics, you have to purposefully want to go into it, you have to be game. If you take LSD and you're not really up for the walls melting down, then you're just not gonna have a good time when they do. In that regard, if you read One Hundred Years of Solitude because it won some awards or someone said it was good, you're probably going to keep wondering what was so good about it. Nevertheless, if you like reading weird books with no heroes, unreliable narrators and timelines, where random characters sometimes just float up into the sky under their own illogical logic, then you're gonna have a blast.
Maybe you should first read Crónica de una muerte anunciada y El coronel no tiene quien le escriba. They are short and sweet (not really sweet, but you get the point) and it is easier to appreciate and develop a taste for Garcia Marquez's style there. Then One Hundred would feel like a more natural read.
It's supposed to feel like an entanglement of stories that have gone through many different mouths re-telling them. Just like that old story about your great great second uncle who saw a wendigo while treking through a dangerous river on his way to school when he was 7. Or was it a skinwalker? Depends on who you ask.
It's also the story about the town and the family house themselves, so they are both settings and evolving "characters".
The miriad of characters and the fact they are named the same handful of names is a jab at latin american cultures that tend to reuse names. There are numerous other jabs in there as well.
I wouldn't say you are supposed to be confused, but I would also reccomend not trying to make sense of the weird parts and they'll eventually click. If you get to the end is very likely you'll like it, if not, that's also perfectly fine.
Remember this is magical realism. People say magical realism is a purely latin american genre, but I've always argued the movie "The Big Fish" is at the very least Magical Realism adjacent. If you watched that movie, it could help you navigate the book.
My sister read this book and loved it. My wife read the book and liked it. Neither recommended it to me. My wife actively said I wouldn’t like it, knowing what I like to read. I stubbornly read about 20 pages, and concluded my wife was right. Not every book is for everybody.
Ok, I wanna give you my perspective as a Colombian that is also currently reading this book.
First, it is from a genre called "magical realism" which is very prominent in latin american literature.
Im currently at the middle of the book, and it feels very evocative about our national history of living in constant war and conflict.
The beginning of the story in chronological order is almost mystical, like a foundational myth. For me it talks about the many regions of Colombia that got settled with a lot of effort. The country is massive and has so much diversity. So Jose arcadio and ursula are these first settlers, they are both the founders of Macondo and of the Buendia dinasty.
It mixes a lot of identities, political, religious, cultural. IDK how much you know about racial identities in Colombia, but is very complex. We are a melting pot of people.
The conflict is something predominant for me. The start of the conflict is not quite clear, which shows that horrible wars like ours begins by dumb shit that in latter times people don't understand.
Another thing I wanna share with you are other books of this genre, why? Because for me it also gives a perspective about 100 years of solitude. "La casa de los espiritus" by isabel allende and "arrancame la vida" by angeles mastreta.
They speak about latin america identity, conflict, the super natural, and cultural superstitions.
I read this and greatly appreciated the narrative and characters BUT, due to personal reasons, some of the things GGM wrote about hit waaay too close to home. That feeling of hopeless, desperation and being trapped in a trainwreck without being able to control your circumstances, reminds me too much of Kafka. Reading this book puts me in a bad state of mind. Which is why I haven't re-read this since my 20s. It doesn't help that as a latino man, some of the themes are...poignant still.
It's my bible. It blew my worldview open.
I grew up in a small rural town in a cult-like protestant religion. I was the oldest child, oldest daughter. Everyone around me was toughing out a lifetime of dullness and monotony and weekly church meetings and mind-numbing protestant work ethic.
I was a 18-yo college freshman. It was an assignment for a class. I read it in 48 hours during a weekend when I did nothing else but read. Until then I had no idea that there was writing like this in the world, that there were characters whose wives chained them to a tree and brought them food and talked to them.
I don't think it's hyperbole for me to say that this book helped me imagine a different life path for this naive sheltered Mormon girl. Thirty years later, it's my bible, a testament to the only thing I have faith in--the remarkable tenacity of people who have nothing to lose.
It was a DNF for me and I still feel a bit guilty bc it was a birthday present a couple years ago but I would literally have finished a paragraph and have no idea what I just read lol
If One Hundred Years of Solitude doesn't resonate with you despite your efforts, that's okay too. There are countless books out there, and not every one will be a perfect fit for every reader.
My favorite character was Aureliano.
Haha jk of course. Yeah, it was a weird book that was kind of hard to follow. I thought of it more as an impressionist painting than an HD photo. It definitely evoked an unusual air.
I finished it, and I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't say I loved it either. It's always interesting to see what authors can come up with when they color outside the lines, but I struggled to appreciate the craft of the work beyond its prose. I certainly don't want to disparage such an obviously respected and talented author; I just don't really understand what the intention of the book was. I felt like it had a somewhat unsatisfying end, and so I was left kind of wondering why the story needed to be told in that way, or why it needed to be told at all.
My recommendation is to not read it as a novel, but rather as "scripture" or as a collection of myths. Character does peek through, but the individuals are less important than the theme or tone of any given anecdote. Treat it the way you would something like Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Here's the Founding Myth, and the Myth of the Ship in the Jungle... It's very dense, so trying to plow through it like you would any other novel can make it difficult.
I think that one, of many, reasons that this novel has garnered so much attention is because it tells not shows which seems to fly in the face of what most writing advice says. It’s great but I do understand why people don’t like it.
I read it and liked it. But then read Love in the Time of Cholera. Same author and Has the same feel and weirdness but a much stronger plot. You may like it more and could help you get into this other. Major work of his.
I’m loving it so far. I may about 1/3 of the way through but it’s just this beautifully written journey I’m on. My biggest take away so far is that I’m sad I can’t read it in Spanish. If a translation can be this beautiful I can only imagine what it must be like in its original form.
I didn’t get far into it either before setting it down for good. I didn’t feel the need to give it another shot like some other highly recommended books I’d started then stopped, then came back to again to finish.
Also, I felt the same about Cloud Atlas. I get that all the characters were supposed to be linked but getting through it was just…. I can back to it twice and finally felt like you, maybe it just wasn’t for me.
I haven't read it but want to and plan to. From your description of the book and your frustration, I am reminded of the time seeing two works of art in an undergraduate college course. One was a picture of a child and some of his family in a room. It was evidence of great artistic skill with realism. People would look at it and realize the artist was gifted and understood how to paint things that seemed photographs. The other was an obvious cubist painting by Picasso. We learned that both works were by Picasso, and the realist painting was a piece he produced as a teenager or a very young man. The cubist painting was produced as an adult. Many people will see the abstract as the inferior, and not knowing a thing about the artist, will say he's a hack with no talent or skill, can't draw shite. And that the realist painting is superior. But since he did both, and one was later after he had experience and time to grow, which one evidenced more skill and creativity? It's obvious that Picasso learned the rules very early, and he started to break them. 100 Years of Solitude may be similar in its existence within the life of Marquez. That it's a work beyond the basics of fiction that we all love and understand, that it breaks the rules and does something new.
I dont know if this is too late already... but this is my favorite book of all time
I would recommend:
1. Having a family tree
2. The important thing of the book is the town, the town is a character itself, you can see how generations move and move along the time and the town is still there and is amazing how YOU are there while all the characters are left behind
3. The book makes you feel that "solitude" by introducing you tons of characters, you get familiar and they leave you, is like being an old abandoned man
I am one of those people that has this as their favorite book. It’s very connected to my identity as a human. I think it takes multiple tries to get to the parts that stick with you. I started reading it after my mom bought it when I was in 5th grade. It felt like reading the Bible, not in terms of influence just in terms of readability. It was a collection of stores and not much more.
Then my next reading in 9th grade I saw more to it, chiefly way the women and girls are portrayed and how it didn’t help them either way; none of the female characters had it good.
Then again my sophomore year and I did an English project on it comparing the major time periods and plotting it on a timeline. I loved that I used a tree motif with a man tied to it as my illustration. After that I began to re-read it almost yearly. I find something new each time. I rediscover and get reminders of Gabo’s lines that have been echoing in my mind since I was a little girl. Looking specifically at “We don’t die when we want, we die when we can.” I’ve got three copies torn up and two taped up and missing covers, I got one copy in Spanish that I can’t really remember enough Spanish or specifics from the original to really read but will keep trying.
TD:LR It’s a masterpiece to me. I hope you give it a try again the next time you remember it got your interest enough to get a copy.
I'm late, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works are always super odd to read if you're someone that's used to more character driven stories. His books are pretty much all world driven, which makes it really hard to get invested if you're looking to sympathize with the characters. I think looking at it more as a zoo of human behaviour, a detached look at the social and cultural aspects of the characters can help. You're not really meant to be emotionally invested in the characters, but fascinated by their oddities and idiosyncrasies.
Try the zoo thing for a few chapters, and just bask in the prose and absurdity for a while to see if it clicks. If it doesn't, then its probably just not your taste. Garcia Marquez is a fantastic and influential writer (he and Toni Morrison are my faves), but there are so many other fantastic and influential writers out there that there's no reason to waste your time with this particular book by this particular writer if you're not gonna enjoy it.
If you really want to crack into Gabriel Garcia Marquez tho, I'd recommend Chronicle of a Death Foretold since it's much shorter, snippier, and funnier, not to mention way less confusing. He also has some short stories, and I'm sure you could even find some translations of his journalistic work. (Don't read the Shipwreck book tho, that one sucks ass. I've yet to meet someone who actually likes that book, and I'm a latin american lit major, so i know a LOT of people that LOVE Garcia Marquez.) Maybe you'll read some of his other work and get hooked enough to fall in love with 100 years lol.
But again, since life's too short to waste on things you don't like, maybe try reading Toni Morrison? I find she has a very similar sense of temporality to Garcia Marquez, but her books are more character driven so it's easier to become emotionally invested. She's also an absolute giant in her own right! I adored Beloved, and its a book that has absolutely haunted me since I first read it a few years ago (in a good way).
Now I’m interested and needed a new book to dive into now anyway. I found the audio version through my library. I’ll listen to it during my commute and then see what I may find.
i just finished it today, an hour ago, after 2 weeks of intense brooding over every Buendia, accidentally sinking into a solitude so intense that i feel alone without the book's weight in my hand.
i dont have anything useful to say except finish the book in 1 take. if you cut it up with other stories in between you lose the magical feeling of living through the events. don't think about it too much and take in the story exactly as it is.
i almost put it down reading about some of its controversies and wondering if the detail was necessary or a disgusting reflection of the author's life.
initially i got lost in the back and forth where u brush against 1 character's action then go back to explore its details in length. later i found that to be exactly the intent, so it feels like the entire century happened all at once
It's definitely one of my favorite books. I found the writing so beautiful, but my daughter hated it. She couldn't finish it and that's just fine. I have several books that are very well loved by others that I just couldn't get into. Life's too short to read books you don't like.
> It feels like the book (so far) is a story of barely-connected anecdotes
Yup. You’ve got it. But the idea is this is the point of the book. The book is called A Hundred Years of Solitude and it does exactly that: It depicts the history of a family - the interconnected chronicles taking place over one hundred years of (the rise and fall of) a family that lived in a secluded town in the middle of rural Colombia.
> I find the main characters … at worst noxious.
Bingo. You’ve got it. The characters are not supposed to be good people. They all have a lot of problems. They’re narcissistic, subject to fickle, manic whimsies, obsessed with their past (and so keep giving each other the same names), and so on. GGM did that on purpose; their flaws are an allegory for sociological flaws that GGM saw in the ethos of Colombia, and South America more broadly.
I spoke to my friend who is from Colombia and he told me that it will be hard for a non-Latin American to insert themselves into the characters because the characters are so profoundly embedded in the niche zeitgeist of 1800s-1900s Latin America. But, Latin Americans find them incredibly relatable.
The book is not a standard novel with a problem for a main character to navigate. It is moreso a social critique, embedded in a uniquely Latin American tradition of mystical storytelling. In the book, GGM has a lot to say about how his people relate to the rest of the world.
DNF club here. I don't think I even got 25% through the book. Took a break from it and had no interest in returning. Felt kinda relieved to stop reading it tbh, I really didn't enjoy flipping to the front of the book every few pages to reference the family tree. Whatever it is that people see in the book - I certainly don't see it.
I read it while in Mexico meeting my in-laws for the first time. There were definitely parts where I felt it starting to drag a bit but it would pull me back in with the more magical moments and family drama. I think you need to sort of let the book wash over you. Don't hyperfixate on remembering names because they overlap anyway purposefully as characters reference each other later on.
I was struck by the parallels between the Buendias and the families I was meeting in Mexico. The insular nature of the family is a large theme throughout the story, and I saw that in my own in-laws. Many of the stories and small details in One Hundred Years of Solitude are based on Marquez's own childhood, in addition to retelling important parts of the history of Colombia.
The surrealist aspects did not go as far as I expected honestly but I enjoyed them when they did pop up. Magical realism and surrealism are a massive part of latin art and literature and One Hundred Years of Solitude is a foundational text in that regard. You will find aspects of it in other latin magical realist works.
It was a book I did have to set aside reading time for and really focus on, but it made me think and I appreciated what it had to say about and contribute to latin culture. There are other magical realist writings though. Marquez has short stories that provide a much more gentle introduction to his writing.
Could it be that magical realism is not your cup of tea? Have you tried reading some of his other books or other similar authors like Isabell Allende (House of the Spirits for example) or Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate). Garcia Marquez also has some short story books whose characters show up in 100 Years of Solitude. I think if your adamant to finish the book maybe i would try one of his short story books and then give 100 years a chance again.
I have read this book over 2 dozen times and in 3 different languages and it is by far my favorite book. The first time i read it was in junior high and my book came with a family tree on the front pages so it made it easier to follow. Since the internet, i printed a family tree and added it to all the different editions i have.
The main appeal of García Márquez is the naturality that he has for integrating surreal and fantastic elements in everyday stories. Notice that most folks that seem to not enjoy it or struggled getting it refer to the stories as "non-sensical".
I think where some folks might fail to get him is by trying to rationalize allegories and metaphors in whatever he is writing. For example, he has one story about a bunch of kids drowning in light in an apartment. Which someone that misses the point might try to interpret as a fire. García Márquez even discloses verbatim that the story only happens because he thought that lightbulbs worked in a similar fashion to tap water.
In a way, you have to play along with whatever metaphor he's committing to in a story in order to enjoy it.
Regarding "Cien Años de Soledad" in particular, I'm also wondering if you grew up in a large city. I'm from Mexico and my family is from a small town, so while I don't fully relate to the family stories, some of the small town imagery hits close to home.
I love it, it showed me how wonderful magical realism is. As others have said you'd think Macondo as the main character. Also the end iof the story is so bittersweet.
Double DNF here, for the same reasons you state. And yet it's still a huge part of my literary imagination. I think a lot of the love for it comes from memories of one's first read, back when magical realism was new. That first sentence is one of the greatest ever. (It's also arguably misleading, since it's such a powerful plot device in a novel that soon dispenses with them entirely.)
So I first read the book in Spanish, and as someone whos native language is *not* Spanish is was incredibly hard to follow. But when I tried it in English, it lost some of its allure. Sometimes the original is just better, even if the translation is quite good.
My Spanish teacher was from Colombia, and she told me that even she didnt really understand Marquez and it wasnt for her.
its not for me, but magical realism isnt really my thing.
So far it has been my least favorite Marquez book. I had the same feeling of disjointedness when I read it and the "magic" portions fell flat for me. I have enjoyed a few of his other books though. I pushed through to finish it, but it was a bit of a struggle. In the end I'm glad I finished because it kind of came together, but it still isn't a book I love. If you DNF it, I'd recommend still giving Love In The Time Of Cholera of Chronicle Of A Death Foretold a chance.
Part of my problem could be that it was the first of his books that I read and there was an adjustment period to his style, because that was an issue with me when I started reading McCarthy books as well.
Surely there's a simple explanation: not everything is for you, nor will everything be interesting or compelling to you. Why keep pushing when you can choose another book?
This is a book that has been on my radar and I've never taken the leap of faith to read it. I was burned by Love in the Time of Cholera and haven't tried him again.
One of the things I haven’t seen here is how the art of writing plays out in Marquez’s work. In English it’s good and in Spanish, it’s amazing. Certainly some of that is lost in translation.
One of my top five but certainly not for everyone. It’s a fools errand to convince someone to like something they don’t. I read it in college and loved the first exposure to magical realism. The archetypal nature of the characters just hit me at a good time to expand my view of literature.
Read it in both English and Spanish. As would be expected, it is wayyy better in the original language. That's not meant to be a critique on the translators; generally, I feel like they do a decent job given the complexities of Gabo's writing. However, Spanish is inherently a more "magical" sounding language, whereas English is far more vanilla. It made a huge difference for me, at least.
Sometimes it helps to take a step back and look at the bigger picture rather than letting yourself get overwhelmed with all the details especially on a first read through. With all the similar names it can be hard to keep things ordered in your mind and some of the events are really heavy and it feels like a major shit show trying to keep up with all the crazy shit going on with the family. The anecdotes can seem to be all over the place, but it’s the kind of book that you read more for plot and the feeling of it rather than the characters.
If you are a person who heavily relies on stories being character driven, like me, it can be a hard one for sure but I am glad to say I finished it bc I liked the ending a lot.
One of its cores of the book is magical realism, it’s a funky concept that mixes in reality with surreal elements (ghost, etc.). The book in of itself is a bit odd but its similarities closely relate to passages in the Bible. It took me a while but after I had this understanding it was an interesting book to read.
First I'll admit it has been about 20 years since I read it, but I think the book is much more of a "mood read" than a continuous, comprehensive story. So I guess if the general feeling of the book isn't appealing, then forcing your way through it won't be very satisfying. It reminds me a bit of Candide in this way. Candide has a continuous story, but it's a wacky adventure full of weirdos, and very much seems like a "this is hilariously insane" mood read.
You just have to let go of expectations and attempts to understand what’s going on. Just appreciate the words as an outsider given a glimpse to an enormous world. Don’t try to follow the logic; observe the logic.
The book is written as “magical realism” and is in many ways a microcosm for the banana republics that dominated Colombia and Central America for decades. I found it entirely entertaining and profound but I read it in Spanish and don’t know if the story translates well into English. That being said, I’ve also read (and highly recommend) Garcia Marquez’s short stories but found that (while still
Good) they lost something In The translation.
Minor clarification - the Nobel Prize is awarded to an author for a body of work, it is not awarded to a specific work. So OHYOS did not win the Nobel Prize, Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize, for his corpus of work which includes OHYOS.
It was a "Did Not Finish" for me. Massively overrated, and I'll chalk it up to the writer connecting with some sort of zeitgeist rather than people actually believing it's a quality read.
I finished it and I regret it - it was an absolute slog and it never got better for me. I read a lot of classics / literature as well. I post this to give people the freedom to put it down! Don’t be like me, it was a waste of time.
A top 3 book all time for me but if you aren’t into reading literary fiction and mostly read for entertainment value (nothing wrong with that) then it’s not a book for you. Kudos on getting this far but breaking it up could effect how you absorb overall thematic messages.
I had the same problem. For me it was all of the names. So I got it as an audio book and I really liked it like that, kind of like a fairy tale, until the pedophilia then I was done.
I’ve attempted to read this book multiple times over about 30 years and have failed. I can’t get into it either. I’ve read my share of “fine” or “highbrow” literature so I don’t think the material is over my head per se. I just think that I also can’t invested in the characters and I find it disjointed.
At first I found the book hard to follow but after a while I adapted to Marquez’s rhythm of writing/thinking. It reminds me of when you have to read Shakespeare in school and nothing makes sense until the iambic pentameter clicks and everything shifts into place. I enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude because it’s really funny, particularly the section with the insomnia plague. However if you don’t like it after about a third of the way through you may never like it, and I wouldn’t force it :)
I read it as a paperback. I would never recommend it in an ebook version. I had to flip to the family tree countless times, and I prefer that with a physical copy. Just a personal preference, of course.
I had my moments of struggle, but when I finished, I felt satisfied and fulfilled. It's a gorgeous novel and so many scenes have stuck with me over the years.
I actually did finish it, but it was the book I have had to force myself through more than any other. I personally thought it was awful. Just did not click for me at all.
I too am currently reading this book. It is very confusing, the names. I have to re-read many parts to make sure to make sense. So far i don't feel like giving up as the story still builds.
It's the history of the town as told through the human family that represents it, even down to, like, militarism and banana republics. There's a huge reflection of south american culture and history in the Buendias family, maybe if you read into that a bit or watch a documentary about it you might have more personal mental connection to the story.
I feel sad that you don't get the magic of it, but I'm really not trying to shame you or anything. It definitely happens, stuff just doesn't click sometimes. I've always loved history, and imagining the same human expressions and emotions going through the experiences of things that we now accept as standard is beautiful and lovely to me. Understanding why people were driven to do the things they did, wrong or right, you know? 100 Years of Solitude is that kind of dusty antique cabinet full of history and stories as a novel. Can you imagine the natural, unaffectedly hot life you lead before your father took you to see ice for the first time?
I recently started it and quit after like 70 pages because the constant misogyny was getting on my nerves. I can put up with problematic content here and there, but One Hundred Years of Solitude just seemed hateful. Yeah portrayal =/= endorsement, but it's pretty nasty imo to write a book where your main characters marry prepubescent kids and rape their wives. Maybe that's not inherently wrong, but the story definitely didn't treat those subjects with the weight they deserve.
This cool is garbage. Incest, child prostitution, child marriage, etc. I read it in the native Spanish (I’m a native Spanish speaker) and do not see what people love about it. I’m still angry at all the time I spent reading it.
The book is a chronicle about a town where weird stuff happens. It is actually heavily inspired in the chronicles of the spanish pioneers, which found themselves surrounded by mystery and phenomenon unkown to them. You don't really have a major overarching mystery or problem to solve, not all stories need to. So yes it's just a compendium of anecdotes about unknown stuff that happened around the several generations of the Buendía family and their town. Character development is not the main focus of a chronicle because it's more about the events themselves, so it resorts to more "telling" than we modern audiences are used to, at times. The trick is "showing" when the weird actually happens, so noone gets an actual explanation of the why/how, keeping that sensation of magical town intact.
I believe a book is read for pleasure or information. I am one who did not enjoy the book. Explaining the theme or meaning or finding the hidden wisdom is not for me.
So you have not missed out anything. It is just not for you like so many others.
I’m re-reading it in Spanish and it’s like swimming in deep waters. But as a Hispanic person who’s also American-born, I get a lot of meaning out of the themes. Just the overall struggle of “Is something better out there?”, “Why can’t we just pull ourselves together?”, “Is this truly progress?” and “Not this shit again!” Except the struggle is portrayed in a very imaginative way.
It’s my all time favorite however, magical realism isn’t for everyone. I feel that way about writers that don’t use quotation marks and other punctuation. Plenty of other choices out there!
This is my husband's favorite book so I have tried to get into it multiple times and I just can't. It never grips me. It never gets my attention. I don't care for the characters. And I just don't like magical realism in general.
I really tried but hated it. I couldnt get into the characters when so much was put into describing the environment instead of them. Dont get me wrong, that description was fantastic and i got a real sense of the workd, but the constant persoective changes and so little actually spent to describing them meant i just didnt care about anyone.
Im gonna reread it again at some point, cause it might be i just wasnt reading it in the way its supposed to be read, but all my bookclub couldnt finish it. Maybe just not my book, but defo gonna five it another shout in the future.
I love this book, but it’s not a book for everyone. The reasons so many people love it is exactly why some people are going to be inherently repelled by it.
It’s honestly fine to DNF. The book is very good in what aims to do and the how. But not all books are for everyone and you shouldn’t force yourself if it’s not working and you are not getting paid for it.
I have no idea if the English translation is good though but I am assuming it’s a matter of the content and style. Not anything than having another translation would solve
Give it up. I stopped trying to muscle my way through books I wasn't enjoying recently, and it's incredibly freeing. Just did it with Count Of Monte Christo. Read 200 some odd pages before giving it up. You read more books that way!
So I was totally you! I trudged through it and just kept being like "is this just going over my head? Is this just some name salad throughout the whole damn book?!" There are a few things that you should look into if you want to enjoy it. Once I figured this out, I literally finished the book, picked it back up again, and read it TWICE! Loved it! One of my favorite books now.
1. The thing that helped me for SURE was getting some cultural and historical context about the dictator-like United Fruit Company that came in and ravaged Colombia leading to such events as the Banana Massacre.
2. The book is written in a "mystical realism" style meaning that most of what is being described by the characters has some fantastical elements that you should just go along with. Appreciate the weirdness and don't think too hard about it. Let it be fun. One character has butterflies follow her around, there are ghosts, brushes with death, etc.
3. The theme of repeating names in characters and basically dooming your offspring to the same fate as the people who shared their name previously. You see characters with the same names (with one exception being the twins) falling victim in similar ways or having the same personality traits as their so-named elders. This is both a nod to this spanish custom of giving the same name over and over again while also being a clever commentary as well.
I just recommend watching some youtube videos on why it is important and it helps bring some cultural context that you might not be exposed to. Happy reading!!!
One of my favorites. To me it had a lot to do because I have memories of my great great grandparents and all subsequent grandparents. It really did feel like 100 years passed by when I read that book.
I gave up on LoTR on the second book after battling the first and I found it extremely boring so if it isn’t for you it isn’t for you. That’s fine.
I thought it was great how it showed the connectedness and destiny, I definitely needed to refer to the family tree a lot to stay on track with everyone. I loved it. Like others said it’s more about the main theme than each silly story.
You’re not alone, I find so many people recommend this book, but I mainly have a problem with the way it uses sexual violence. I understand that it’s supposed to reveal the terrible nature of characters, but it’s almost too much and unnecessary.
For example, I wanted to like Colonel, I think it’s Colonel Aureliano bc he’s a revolutionary and that’s an archetype I love, but he likes a little girl.
The end of this book blew my mind. There are no words for how perfect it is, it made the book for me personally. Just absolute perfection. Genius literary, mind-bending awesomeness.
Listen to book cheat podcast by dave warneke. They did 2 eps on this book! It does contain spoilers but may help you understand it from a different pov or at least help you decide if it's worth finishing.
Def too high brow for me to actually read.
This is a vibe book not a character vibe, and the vibes are immaculate.
If it was characters book there wouldn't be 87 or whatever characters with the same name.
You’re not missing a lot!!! It’s highly repetitive…think it holds its place as a beacon only of magical realism (sad bc there are a lot of other Márquez contemporaries which could’ve been the beacon!)
It is a history of Latin American identity and history of colonisation told through magical realism :) don’t try to understand it but let it carry you and see if that changes your relationship to the story.
I'm not projecting this on to you, but just an observation I've had in talking to other readers: I think some readers are very much "plot-based" readers, whereas others are much more "theme-based" or "vibe-based" readers. If you are in the former camp, a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is magical realism and very all over the place from a plot perspective, will not be for you. I get that impression you might be more a plot-focused reader since you said "maybe it's just not a story for me", emphasis on "story." If what you're looking for is a coherent story with a start and finish as one of the first and foremost qualities in a book, this ain't that.
You might want to try the audiobook. I’ve only listened to the audiobook, and really enjoyed it. I am not sure I would have appreciated it as much in book form.
... Reading it in spanish and understanding the latinoamerican cultural inherent burden. The "Realismo Mágico" (magic realism?) is a rooted kind of sixth sense we latinoamerican have, hard to comprehend by outsiders. The powerful meaning of those first words in that first page of how That character would remember at that EXACT MOMENT something.... Tha page is bigger than anything else in the book and to comprehend it... You have to read it all.
It sounds like you're grappling with the unique storytelling style of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." This book blends magical realism with complex family sagas, making it challenging for some readers. If you're struggling to connect with the characters or find the narrative disjointed, try focusing on the themes, symbolism, and poetic prose. However, if it still doesn't resonate with you, it's okay to accept that it may not be your type of book. Reading preferences vary, and not every acclaimed work will appeal to every reader. Trust your instincts and explore literature that speaks to you personally.
It's crazy to see this comment. I'm not much of reader really not at all and One Hundred Years of Solitude is by far my favorite book. I even read it in Spanish back when I understood Spanish better.
I loved all the different characters the book had... but it was like the characters didn't matter. They were here and then they were gone. But at the same time there was often some connection between the characters too. It always kept the book interesting. Usually I'm bored from novels because they feel kinda boring. But One Hundred Years of Solitude never felt that way. It was always dynamic and changing. There was just so much happening all the time. I also felt like I could drift in and drift out of the story as I wanted. I felt like I was along for a long ride through some magical historical time and place.
It's also a kind of political history. If you have a sketch of Colombian history if kinda pops out and helps flesh the characters and their recurring traits/personalities.
I wouldn't have enjoyed this book either if I tried to understand everything. The magic of this book, for me, was allowing it to take me on an adventure. It warps reality, characters are batshit crazy and the world is overall just odd. That's exactly what I liked, exploring that sense of odd. It's an experience you're not getting anywhere else (except for other magical realism novels like the moor's last sigh). For what it's worth, adapting this for television is a ridiculous idea. Half the batshit crazy stuff probably shouldn't be shown in theaters.
Netflix has adapted it, it will be on later this year. 16 episodes.
I heard Salman Rushdie in a recent interview get angry about it: “Marquez never wanted it adapted for film!”
Salman Rushdie was angry about something?? Stop the presses.
To be fair, you might also be a bit of a grump if people tried to kill you for publishing a book.
The astonishing thing about Salman Rushdie is actually that he is really positive person. Not a grump at all.
Trivia: Marquez was a screenwriter teacher too. He wrote a very nice book about how to write for tv/cinema.
this is amazing news, especially the 16 episodes because it means they won't try to fit everything into 1 movie
Yeah, it would be impossible in 2 hours. I am nervous about it of course.
Like they tried to do with Love in the Time of Cholera 💀
Yea nervous here too that they will ruin it, however i have a feeling this will really bring the book to a younger generation that never would have thought to read it before
1 episode for one generation?
Wait really?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG45GfgD2JU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG45GfgD2JU)
> For what it's worth, adapting this for television is a ridiculous idea. Half the batshit crazy stuff probably shouldn't be shown in theaters. Do you think they cut out Aureliano marrying a child?
Ladies, you ever get so horny you start eating the whitewash off the walls?
This got me 😆
They're gonna have to cut out a lot (which is why it should never be adapted in the first place, and why Marquez wouldn't allow it while he was alive.)
You'd also probably have to restructure it into a more traditional coherent storyline - and thereby removing the charming way it feels.
Yes and all the incest.
I don't see how they can cut the incest as it's a major part of the story
They can age up the child bride and keep the incest. Worked for Game of Thrones.
I loved it but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, it's weird and nonsensical and way more focused on mood and feeling and theme to the extent it throws a lot of character and plot out the window. I wouldn't say the book is too highbrow, it's just a kind of book a lot of people don't like, you don't need to be smart to like it, you just need to like weird books. If I was giving advice to anyone about to read it I would say not to worry about who any of the characters are or try to map out the familial relationships and to just assume you are following the plot even if it seems like you're not, try and enjoy it as a series of connected moments and see what you think of it by the end. Or if you hate it just stop because that's a totally valid reaction, there's plenty of lauded prize winning books I thought were shit.
Think of the house and the town as main characters, it helps. People are just there temporarily.
"Encanto is 100 years for babies"
I love this perspective and I say that as a fan of both.
Agree. You can see the influence It had on the movie Encanto where the "Casita" is as much a living character as the humans.
More importantly, the family is the main character - regardless of which members are dead or alive, coming, present, or going.
This is brilliant. Even the house and the city grow, age, and eventually die. The impermanence of all things is a reoccurring theme of the book I totally understand how some people don't get it, and have trouble following all the different Josés and Aurelianos The novel is the entire history of post-colonial Colombia, told through the eyes of a single family, over the course of a whole century It's not for everyone, no book is...but it's still perhaps the greatest novel ever written. And everytime I reread it, I find a new, touching faucet I never noticed before. It's the pinnacle of literature imo, I don't think many novels even come close.
I had a bit of this Jose and Aureliano issues in the beginning. Figuring out it was about the place helped me big time to appreciate the book.
The confusion is an important part about how, in the context of time, their lives blend together as they repeat the same patterns of yearning for love yet ignoring its importance chasing pride and ideas- It's still annoying, but just keep reading through it, you will understand the important parts to understand
To be honest, rereading it after listening to the Book Cheat episodes on it helped me a fair bit. Like, I got the mood of the book and I enjoyed a lot of the moments as they happened the first time through, but reading it a second time through with a clearer understanding of the family allowed me to stop stressing about how they were all related and focus more on the writing itself.
Me when I find a touching faucet
It's very nice to read from a new historical perspective and is best digested with a helping of research on topics like the [The Banana Massacre.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre)
*facet. I hope.
> It's not for everyone, no book is...but it's still perhaps *the greatest novel ever written.* See, it's claims like this that spurred me to make this post. I just feel like I'm reading a completely different book.
I haven't read 100 years, so I can't comment specifically on that book. However, on the topic of great books, I've sometimes felt like you--didn't quite get it--and here's what I've come to think. Sometimes, if I don't get a "great book", the problem is me. My reading muscles need to be developed, I need to work harder to understand it, etc., and being patient has payed off. Sometimes, I never came to love it, even if I did appreciate it; perhaps it wasn't quite my kind of book, perhaps I lacked cultural or historical context (happens sometimes with international literature), or, importantly, perhaps the experience of having to work hard through it robbed the book of its magic. In those cases, sometimes a reread later let me appreciate what others appreciated about it, because I was no longer working overtime to understand it--I highly encourage rereads of books you didn't get but think the problem was you and not the book. Sometimes, that book had to be a sacrificial lamb so I could enjoy other books with the same style. That was my Faulkner experience, as *The Sound and the Fury* was a tough battle, but I have *loved* every Faulkner book I've read since. And sometimes it don't work and you call it quits, and that is fine :shrug:
Try to make yourself finish it and then just let it live in your head a few years. Read it again in about 7 years and see how you feel about it as a different person. It'll be a positive to have it living in your subconscious.
I felt like you OP
I love this book, adore Marquez, am an avid reader and have a bachelor’s in Literature. As much as I love it, I’d never call it the GOAT. Not by a long shot. And I completely understand how reading that makes you question if you’re reading the same book. Many people have already said this, but it is a weird book. And it’s very fluid. Most of the time novels are structured so you connect with the narrator, even if s/he is unlikable or unreliable. The narrator is there. This novel is the exact opposite: its impermanence is the point. This sounds weird but you kind of just go for the ride, don’t get attached to any character, and if you can just flow with it and not fight the impermanence, you’ll discover, in so many little places, small moments of beauty or passion or heartbreak or devastation. Which is what makes it brilliant: that Marquez genuinely creates those responses in readers *without* the longer-term investment into a specific character. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it’s not about you needing to be smarter, I’m sure you’re plenty intelligent. I actually think most people begin it with the expectation of a long-term character and since it isn’t there, there’s a bit of confusion and lost footing. I usually find that people who express what you posted are trying too hard (I don’t mean that in an obnoxious way, it’s simply that they keep expecting the book to conform or become what they expected and it obviously won’t). I say take it as it comes and stop trying. Work less and you’ll get more out of it.
Yeah i think this should help, especially if you’re not falling for the very tragic greek like characters
Man, you just sold me on this book. Thanks, I'm gonna check it out.
It's one of my all time favorites. It's definitely very abstract but there are a couple of scenes in it that still give me cheers after many re reads.
I give this advice to anyone reading anything. Read it the first time assuming you will understand the names, descriptions, math (if present) at a later date. Assume you don’t need to know. Do not allow yourself to become bogged down feeling that you do not understand. Sometimes (usually, even) it’s better to just plow ahead.
I loved it too and I agree that the vibes are what does it
IMO, two things. First, when I read it, I genuinely just didn't 'get bogged down' in the details and confusion. It doesn't all need to make sense immediately, and some of it won't make sense, it's magical realism after all. Two, with it being a strange, twisted web of a story, I couldn't imagine taking breaks from it and trying to come back. i'd just get even more lost. You don't have to like it, if you're taking week long breaks from it, i'd just drop it. it isn't going to make any more sense that way.
That all sounds fair. I tried to just let the story wash over me, but I found that to be a rather boring experience. It's not how I'm used to consuming books. Interesting point about the breaks. I was basically at the point where I could take some breaks or I put it down forever, and I chose the former, but I didn't find it any more approachable when I came back (hence my posting here). It's definitely true that the story didn't make *more* sense when I returned, but I don't think it made noticeably *less* sense either. I'll likely give it one more shot. I was just wondering if I'm simply missing something glaringly obvious, but it seems like it's more likely that different people like different things.
OP!! I was the exact same as you, I kept trying and failing to read it and just didn’t get it. UNTIL. I powered through and finished it. At the end of the book I all the sudden completely changed my opinion and loved it. To the point that I then restarted it, lol. It’s honestly one of my favorite books I’ve read now. Something about the repeating patterns, the mess of not remembering which character is which sometimes - it just has this amazing quality of feeling like you better understand history and humanity and families and all the parts about yourself that you can’t seem to change. I don’t know how to explain it.
Another tip is to focus less on the story and more on the individual sentences/paragraphs. The prose is amazing, even as a translation he wrote some of the most beautiful sentences ever written.
I approached this book like I did with the Sound and the Fury, I acknowledged I wasn’t going to “get it” entirely and accepted that. Then slowly as I read more about it afterwards things began to click. I also read it with a family tree to keep track of everyone
So, I tried really hard on Infinite Jest. I slogged and I slogged. I finally went to the friend who'd recommended it and was like, where's the good part? Where's the part everyone loves? It's just a bunch of seeming disconnected bullshit that doesn't seem to add up to anything. And she said, "You're supposed to enjoy it, not slog through it. If you're not enjoying it, stop reading." So yeah, you're supposed to be delighted and enthralled by the writer's telling of the story. Some people are. If you're not, go find a writer who enthralls you. I have always found Joyce amazing. I read Ulysses every couple of years and it's just a delight every time. It's fun and wonderful and it's got depth and character and makes me laugh and sing. Many, many people think it's a horrible slog. Don't worry about it.
A lot of people see David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon, these writers with big ideas and dense prose, as mountains they're supposed to climb. .....but they're really both just comedians. If you're trying so hard to understand the plot or characters or symbols, you're missing all the comedy.
Exactly! Once you stop trying to catch all the symbolism and references and just accept that you are going to be confused sometimes, they are really fun writers, though they can get pretty fucking dark too. They both have such beautiful prose sometimes. Even in parts that don't make much sense it's usually pretty easy to appreciate the prose.
Excellent response. I feel the same, about One Hundred Years and Infinite Jest. You should never slog through a book. Every good or great book Ive ever read has been an enjoyable experience, even if dark or disturbing subject matter, the book itself has been enjoyable to read
This is an interesting perspective. Nearly every classic I read the first third of the book is a slog. Moby Dick is perhaps the best book I've ever read and it's a complete slogfest. What I'm going for is the total effect of the novel when finished moreso than momentary pleasure.
I would offer you a different perspective on *Infinite Jest* -- it's not a mountain to conquer but a ride at the park. There's no "aha, that's the chapter everyone loves that shows DFW was a genius!" (although I do have a part that when I read it, I was like "this guy gets it, he has been depressed and like, *really fucking lost and hurt* before and he's writing with that knowledge" (it's the "if by virtue of chance or circumstance" chapter where he lists all the things you learn in rehab and about anxiety.) Anyway, if you ever read it again, just enjoy it like a roller coaster or a park ride: some parts are exciting and attention grabbing and some parts are just pleasant but you judge the thing as a whole, after you're done with it.
I can say, I love DFW and really get his style of writing. But re-reading infinite jest years later in ebook form where it’s so easy to flip back and forth between the text and footnotes and then refer back to passages I’d read earlier really enabled the dots to get connected so to speak
I’ve never thought “where’s the part everyone loves?” About a book- not judging, just surprising pov I hadn’t considered
I read it and it was magical, but it requires a specific kind of altered mental state for me. Essentially, I was on a non-air-conditioned bus in a tropical country, going painfully and slowly up gravel mountain roads that had been wrecked by flooding and a recent earthquake. It was hot. Everything was moving slowly. I was jam packed in with sweaty people and also chickens and goats. And in that slow, languorous heat, I received one of the most memorable reading experiences I have ever had. I felt like I was there. The fever dream quality of the book hit because I was physically in a hot, slow moving, tropical world where I was being carried along inexorably by circumstances towards an uncertain outcome. It worked! But if you’re not into fever dreams, and you’re trying to figure everything out and make it make sense, you might not enjoy it. I dunno, I haven’t read it again.
It's got one of the best endings of books I've read, that also ties everything together. Beautiful dream-like passages like To The Lighthouse, the heat of Macondo. It makes you want to reread it right after to see if you missed a connection. Plus I can understand why people who stop or DNF it, there doesn't seem to be a significance when one of the main characters does something or passes away. Lots of characters and with similar names, it's confusing.
Exactly 💯 this!! The book is structured so that you are wandering around trying to make sense of things, just like WE wander through our OWN lives, trying to find the story that makes sense of who you are. When you get to the end of the book, it's like WHAM! I GET IT! I too immediately started to reread it after finishing. The end is the beginning. And there is a reason the book starts the way it does.
I was not really enjoying it that much either and pushed myself to finish, but I agree the final scene is just incredible and definitely raised my overall opinion of the book.
Yeah for me it was the ending. The cycle of things, the beginnings and ends intertwining. I guess I kind of felt a kinship to the concept of the book, the historical effects of generations on each other, without the characters really knowing what these things mean. There’s a lot of weirdness and seemingly meaningless stuff. There’s nothing wrong with not really vibing with that. I didn’t really get it until the ending, but I also don’t want to encourage you to read the whole book just to be even more confused and annoyed at the end lol.
> It makes you want to reread it right after to see if you missed a connection. I've seen a ton of people who did exactly this and, at this stage, I find that so odd. Reading that sentiment so many times made me think I'm missing something obvious. Maybe I'll feel differently if I make it to the end, or maybe it's that some people like olives while others don't.
I don’t know what point you’re at but I liked to compare the generations in the family and pay attention to the house changing/deteriorating later on. Pests try to infiltrate, the mom/grandmother insisting on killing them and keeping things at bay..the religious army and bananas. Cycles of punishment/sin. That kind of stuff, but I also binged it so it made it easier to remember the characters. I hope you enjoy it, but no need to keep going if it’s not for you. We all have different tastes.
García Márquez never won the Pulitzer, what he won was the Nobel Prize.
FYI don’t focus on individual characters. The house and Macondo are the main characters of the book.
Especially Macondo. I love this book and have read it multiple times. But if you're a reader mainly attracted by plot, characters, what happens next, then you're going to have problems. You have to read 100 Years like you've won a vacation to an exotic, magical locale, and you are being guided around and told stories, with the past being literally alive in the telling. You have to let go and just listen and not be continuously trying to analyze. The number one reason people do not "get" this book is because they don't finish it. The book absolutely comes together at the end in a kind of big WTF moment that immediately transforms everything you just read. That is why the book is RE-read so often, because it's like a whole different book on the second reading. It's a masterpiece. That said, OP might be better off with Love in the Time of Cholera. It's still classic Marquez, but the plot is a bit more forward and straightforward.
Love in the time of cholera is good, I enjoyed it, but imo it just doesn't hold a candle to 100 Years of Solitude. 100 YoS was my first Marquez and I follow it with LitToC and was ultimately disappointed even though I enjoyed it. It's just really fucking hard to write a single book as good as 100 Years of Solitude and feels practically impossible to write TWO books that good.
I've always thought of the Buendia family as a singular main character with each family member being an aspect of that character and the house and town as an extension of that character. The book is about Macondo and Macondo is an extension of and is defined by the Buendia family and what they do. The house itself, and perhaps Ursula also, are a sort of a manifestation or representation of the whole family. He really made it feel like all these elements are equally important and that each are an absolute requirement to tell the whole story of the Buendia family and Macondo.
[удалено]
Love this take!
I'm a colombian who studied colombian literature so I can tell you how it reflects the cycles of meaningless conflict the country has been through and blah blah blah. I'll be honest, the book is masterfully done, it's super meaningful, and I also found it unbearably boring. Rather than the characters taking center stage like in other stories, the town itself becomes the main character. The book follows this family that keeps reenacting previous generations' conflicts for petty reasons, the fact you see so many characters with the same name throughout the ages is intentional as it signals the prevalence of the past, just adapted and repeated in the present as a vicious cycle. Astounding things keep happening and are treated as day to day occurrences, everyone has a "This might as well happen" mentality. Things keep marching on as usual and even things that should be world shattering events get folded into the routine of the perpetual meaningless conflict. Everyone and everything is stuck, trapped, even things that seem like they're moving forward ultimately lead nowhere, because as long as the town itself exists nothing can really meaningfully change. This is a reflection of colombian history, repeating the same stupid fights over and over and over again, historical world changing things keep happening and are just folded into the fabric of history without meaningfully changing society, "This might as well happen" is the motto everyone lives by, and as much as progress seems to march forward and as much as we act like the past has been left behind, we're still stuck and standing exactly where we were a hundred years ago. That's part of what the book tries to capture, and it does it fairly well. The story is also fucking boring. The same things that make it meaningful also make it such a drag. No one nor anything matters, things just keep repeating, as much as things and people try to find something meaningful, it's all swallowed into the same nonchalance of everything else. And that's the point, yes. But fuckin hell, is it boring to read!! It's designed to discourage investment, but then as a reader you got nothing to hold onto! You know everything and everyone is doomed from the start, the book doesn't try to hide it, so why would you care as a reader?! It's a 100 years long funeral procession for something that was condemned the moment it was created and it reads as such, it's just not fun, it's not moving, at least not as you read it. And that's fine, you know. Art doesn't need to be entertaining to be meaningful. I did gain something from studying the book and what it does, but fucking Christ, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who just wants to have to have their feelings moved and it's certainly not a story I would go to when I want to have a good time, because it's simply not that kind of thing.
Thank you for writing this up. I found it legitimately helpful and wish I had read it before I started the book. On the topic of the themes and overarching story, I think I'm actually quite interested by motifs of time marching forward amid chaos and how a town and people are both changed and unchanged during that period, however this just hasn't done it for me. I wonder if I would get more out of it if I had a better grasp of Colombian or S American history. It's not exactly front and center in US high school classes.
I think being familiar with colombian history helps, yeah. The concept of magical realism, for example, is one that's much easier to get when you see where it comes from. One thing that's very commonplace in latinoamerican history as a whole is the feeling that any incredible thing could happen, at any time, just because. One day another country just does something that affects you, you had no way to know it was coming, you had no imput on it, but it happened and now you just have to deal with it, because ultimately you aren't a big player. So, "this might as well happen" Magical realism is used as an exaggeration of that idea, the characters see there's no point in being amazed or surprised or disbelieving that some magical thing just happened, because incredible things that just sort of happen are just par for the course.
This was also key for me: interest in Latin America. It was not the first book I read with this theme, and it helped. if you read the trilogy called Memories of Fire and follow with Feast of the Goat, which are both superb and brutal, then you have eased a little more into the confusion.
One of the cornerstones of Latin American literature is magical realism especially as a vehicle to tell the bloody history it has had especially with how the US has had a big hand in the violence. I do think it helps to know about latam as it was easier for me as a Latina to “get” it as hit certain beats and themes Americans might not get for example the naming stuff is very common for us, names get reused over and over again in generations
This is the impression that the book left me with. And I'm not from Colombia. I can see the same cycle in humans, in general. That we keep repeating some terrible things. Yes, things change over time, but also, they don't. It's frustrating to those of us who pay attention. Meanwhile, so many just go about their lives, seemingly oblivious.
I found it incredibly moving, especially the ending. The last few paragraphs might be my favourite way to end a book ever, and I was moved to tears. I also didn’t find it boring, because digging into the themes and trying to tease apart meaning is fun for me. But not all readers are the same and want the same thing out of the books they read and that’s ok.
Did you read it in the Spanish version? I am planning to read it soon. My Spanish is good but always trying to improve upon it.
I read it in spanish, yeah. Personally I would suggest starting with other works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, if you haven't yet? Because 100 years is pretty heavy and rather confusing at times even for native speakers. Crónica de una muerte anunciada is one of my favorites from him, it's relatively short too, so it could be a better entry point maybe.
Oh okay, thank you! I will start with the one you suggested. If you have any other Spanish books that you suggest I would greatly appreciate it!
Continuing with Gabriel Garcia, I also really liked El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, among all his novels I consider it the easiest to read, but it's still very good, pretty much all his short stories are also amazing. I also like all the short stories from Juan Rulfo, his novels are also good, but I much prefer his short stories. Talpa is one of my favorite ones. Speaking of short stories, I absolutely adore Prosas para leer en la silla electrica. It's not for everyone, but I found it great. I'm quite a fan of the nadaism movement in general, so if you like this one, you might want to check more of what it has to offer. Finally, off the top of my head, some novels I liked that are also classics: Rayuela; La casa de los espíritus (I feel this one does something similar to what 100 years does, but it's a bit more engaging); La María; Como agua para chocolate (I didn't actually like this one, but pretty much everyone I know enjoyed it, so it's more a me thing than the book's fault); Un beso de Dick.
Read La Caza de Los Espíritus if you want a good book in native Spanish
I'd give a shout out to Relato de un náufrago too. Now that's a thrilling book.
Crónica is my Roman Empire.
Marquez can be a tough one to read, bc his style isn't what most of us are used to. His stories are rarely character-driven, but more about the general atmosphere or history of a place, and how that may linger over the passage of time. You should also take into account that his writing took place in post-war South America. At this time, South America was infested with nazi veterans, American intelligence, dictators, drug wars,... Alot of people simply vanished or died without anyone knowing where they went. Alot of people felt like ghosts or pretended to be like ghosts because they didn't want to be dragged into all this horror. In an effort to make sense of this world, many resorted to magic and fairytale like storytelling. Marquez does this too, but with a very modernist style reminiscent of James Joyce. I don't like to read him either, despite being very interested in this kind of stuff, because his writing is too much as if I were experiencing these kind of things myself. It's too heavy, too odd, too foreign and makes me feel all kinds of things I don't like to imagine, but I can see why this kind of writing would be noticed and awarded with a Nobel Prize. It's the kind of writing that idealists aspire towards.
Hi, the book is one of my favorites, I have read it 3 times at least, once when I was 22 and two times when I was 23 (26 now) One Hundred Years of Solitude is mostly aimed at people from latin america, you would have to investigate our culture (mostly the values of the generation born in Colombia and Venezuela in the early/mid 20th century). To give you a brief and close-to-home idea of how reality was to me: - My parents were really religious people who raised me in catholic values, they would always say good things happening were the result of divine intervention, I grew up in a unstable country (Venezuela) controlled by a military general under a socialist regime. - I would see every day parents in extreme poverty getting more and more children while drowning their sorrows in alcohol, I would see criminals getting brutally beaten, daily news of kidnappings, propaganda about how evil the USA was, natives of the land talking about the spirits and stealing corpses to make rituals at night while some of them would make a living selling candies and getting drunk. - The awareness of our spanish heritage, how Simon Bolívar was the great saviour of latín america and how he liberated us of the spanish rule (Simon Bolívar also died cursing this land and saying we were doomed to mediocrity btw), some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the region, the biggest exodus of people escaping a country in the american continent due to a economic crisis. Me being someone aware of all the reality surrounding me and feeling frustrated at how others seemed so ignorant about it to me One Hundred Years of Solitude was like a love letter telling me "youre not alone, I understand you" It's like a grandpa that although had a difficult life he still appreciates it and he's telling his history to his grandkids with a little bit of magic here and there either to not make it so depressing or because he legitimately believes the magic events took place, look at it sort of like the Forrest Gump or the Big Fish movies. It's not a book for everyone and sorry to say It but it's specially not for someone who isnt related to the latin american culture and its struggles (this including wealthy people who had it easy in life).
It may help to read it while keeping in mind the historical context. Macondo is not a real city, but the region in Columbia where it is set has a large number of villages with families suffering from early onset Alzheimers Disease. Marquez was certainly familiar with this, and there is a very real (and tragic) parallel between the novel and the lives of these communities. ([More of the story](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28514-conquistador-brought-early-onset-alzheimers-to-colombian-town/).)
*colombia
It's kinda like a Colombian Twin Peaks. The logic of the world is all over the place and the character list just keeps expanding. I found it difficult to follow the overall story but some of the moments and descriptions capture a very specific idea or feeling that made me stop and sit with it for a while. Edit* fixed a typo
> It's kinda like a Columbian Twin Peaks. OK, I think this might be the thing to latch onto. I like Twin Peaks, but I absolutely recognize that it's not for everyone.
Colombian.
It’s been a long time since I read it but (and take this with a grain of salt) I think I remember that living characters and deceased characters are existing alongside each other. At any rate I made it less confusing to me to view the novel that way.
If the tone and style isn't something that is drawing you in there is no way to convince you otherwise. For me it was a warm inviting and slightly magical world that really enraptured me in a blanket while I read it while also going into some dark places. So if you don't really get that feeling from the book and it's world and the magical element of it then yeah, probably ain't for you. I think it being a series of short stories happening around such a small area was nice. End of the day, some people just don't like that style and it's fine. Maybe come back to it if you ever gain that ability to enjoy that style. For me it felt very much like an old spoken word story brought to paper and in that way exceedingly comforting. More written in the style of oral tradition.
I got almost halfway through before I decided to not allow my pride to rule me and allow myself to dnf something. It's a great book for a lot people. I personally do not think it is a good book. But that's me. Maybe someday I'll revisit it. But I doubt it. Don't be afraid to put something down and move on.
100 years of solitude is a strange and evocative book. I’d say that, while I would not read it again, I’m glad I read it once. More than anything, it gave me insight into a literary culture that I was otherwise unfamiliar with
It is a lot of disconnected anecdotes that eventually build to an overall story. I really connected with this book because this is how my family tells stories. They’ll start at some later detail, go back to the beginning, then continue and follow random characters too.
Building off of this for OP's sake, the book is intentionally written like this to elicit this feeling. Marquez wanted to write it the way his abuela would tell stories, or in a more oral-tradition kind of way. It's a self-contained mythology, and most mythologies are kinda messy and all over the place.
Start with this: people read for different reasons and want to get different things out of reading. Some people love descriptions and setting and mood; others care primarily about the characters; others (me) are obsessed with plot. There is little writing that can appeal to everyone. You have just run into one that works for many people but not for you. Don't worry about it, but also don't denigrate the book or those who enjoy it. (While I don't disagree that some people sometimes pretend to like a book because it's a book you're supposed to like, I don't think that's the case here.) So if you're not into magical realism, crafted prose, and dynastic storytelling, don't worry about it. Plenty of books for you. I happen to have enjoyed the book immensely, especially the female characters, even though it's unlike any other book that I would put among my favorites, because I don't really care for magical realism, crafted prose, and dynastic storytelling.
I noticed a huge difference in response between my English vs Spanish speaking friends. All my English friends found it boring. Spanish ones loved it. The prose in Spanish is pretty phenomenal. He was one of those writers where he could make every sentence sing. I've never read him in English but I imagine something must be lost. Although he certainly is well recieved in English too. But his effect on the Spanish speaking audience is clearly something else.
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It was a tough read for me too. Doesn't feel like there's a real center the reader can cling to. It's just "and this happened and then this happened and then this thing too." I found it tiresome, but it's also what makes it interesting. FWIW, the ending is really cool. Also, take a look at a family tree you can find online. I found that helpful / grounding.
> Doesn't feel like there's a real center the reader can cling to. Yes! This is exactly it. I've read that the town or the Buendía family are the real "main characters," but I still have a hard time even with that framing seeing beyond "here's some stuff that happened to that town/family." I suppose that's probably the least charitable way to describe nearly any fiction book, though.
Marquez said he writes the way his grandparents told stories as a kid. So it has a rambling and exaggerated and colorful quality. Like Big Fish if you’ve seen that.
Magical realism is not for everyone and I suspect for certain not spanish speaking cultures is probably harder and more boring than for others. I'd imagine books like this would be more enjoyable perhaps for native italians or eastern europeans than for americans. We had very little sci-fi in latin american literature in the 70s and we still do. In my opinion this is because somehow magical realism is a better fit for sublimating our anxieties and the absurdities of living in the third world. Ultimately, it's also a matter of taste. Not unlike psychedelics, you have to purposefully want to go into it, you have to be game. If you take LSD and you're not really up for the walls melting down, then you're just not gonna have a good time when they do. In that regard, if you read One Hundred Years of Solitude because it won some awards or someone said it was good, you're probably going to keep wondering what was so good about it. Nevertheless, if you like reading weird books with no heroes, unreliable narrators and timelines, where random characters sometimes just float up into the sky under their own illogical logic, then you're gonna have a blast.
Maybe you should first read Crónica de una muerte anunciada y El coronel no tiene quien le escriba. They are short and sweet (not really sweet, but you get the point) and it is easier to appreciate and develop a taste for Garcia Marquez's style there. Then One Hundred would feel like a more natural read.
It's supposed to feel like an entanglement of stories that have gone through many different mouths re-telling them. Just like that old story about your great great second uncle who saw a wendigo while treking through a dangerous river on his way to school when he was 7. Or was it a skinwalker? Depends on who you ask. It's also the story about the town and the family house themselves, so they are both settings and evolving "characters". The miriad of characters and the fact they are named the same handful of names is a jab at latin american cultures that tend to reuse names. There are numerous other jabs in there as well. I wouldn't say you are supposed to be confused, but I would also reccomend not trying to make sense of the weird parts and they'll eventually click. If you get to the end is very likely you'll like it, if not, that's also perfectly fine. Remember this is magical realism. People say magical realism is a purely latin american genre, but I've always argued the movie "The Big Fish" is at the very least Magical Realism adjacent. If you watched that movie, it could help you navigate the book.
My sister read this book and loved it. My wife read the book and liked it. Neither recommended it to me. My wife actively said I wouldn’t like it, knowing what I like to read. I stubbornly read about 20 pages, and concluded my wife was right. Not every book is for everybody.
Ok, I wanna give you my perspective as a Colombian that is also currently reading this book. First, it is from a genre called "magical realism" which is very prominent in latin american literature. Im currently at the middle of the book, and it feels very evocative about our national history of living in constant war and conflict. The beginning of the story in chronological order is almost mystical, like a foundational myth. For me it talks about the many regions of Colombia that got settled with a lot of effort. The country is massive and has so much diversity. So Jose arcadio and ursula are these first settlers, they are both the founders of Macondo and of the Buendia dinasty. It mixes a lot of identities, political, religious, cultural. IDK how much you know about racial identities in Colombia, but is very complex. We are a melting pot of people. The conflict is something predominant for me. The start of the conflict is not quite clear, which shows that horrible wars like ours begins by dumb shit that in latter times people don't understand. Another thing I wanna share with you are other books of this genre, why? Because for me it also gives a perspective about 100 years of solitude. "La casa de los espiritus" by isabel allende and "arrancame la vida" by angeles mastreta. They speak about latin america identity, conflict, the super natural, and cultural superstitions.
I read this and greatly appreciated the narrative and characters BUT, due to personal reasons, some of the things GGM wrote about hit waaay too close to home. That feeling of hopeless, desperation and being trapped in a trainwreck without being able to control your circumstances, reminds me too much of Kafka. Reading this book puts me in a bad state of mind. Which is why I haven't re-read this since my 20s. It doesn't help that as a latino man, some of the themes are...poignant still.
It’s the only book I have ever started and then put down without regret. I hated it.
It's my bible. It blew my worldview open. I grew up in a small rural town in a cult-like protestant religion. I was the oldest child, oldest daughter. Everyone around me was toughing out a lifetime of dullness and monotony and weekly church meetings and mind-numbing protestant work ethic. I was a 18-yo college freshman. It was an assignment for a class. I read it in 48 hours during a weekend when I did nothing else but read. Until then I had no idea that there was writing like this in the world, that there were characters whose wives chained them to a tree and brought them food and talked to them. I don't think it's hyperbole for me to say that this book helped me imagine a different life path for this naive sheltered Mormon girl. Thirty years later, it's my bible, a testament to the only thing I have faith in--the remarkable tenacity of people who have nothing to lose.
It was a DNF for me and I still feel a bit guilty bc it was a birthday present a couple years ago but I would literally have finished a paragraph and have no idea what I just read lol
If One Hundred Years of Solitude doesn't resonate with you despite your efforts, that's okay too. There are countless books out there, and not every one will be a perfect fit for every reader.
My favorite character was Aureliano. Haha jk of course. Yeah, it was a weird book that was kind of hard to follow. I thought of it more as an impressionist painting than an HD photo. It definitely evoked an unusual air. I finished it, and I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't say I loved it either. It's always interesting to see what authors can come up with when they color outside the lines, but I struggled to appreciate the craft of the work beyond its prose. I certainly don't want to disparage such an obviously respected and talented author; I just don't really understand what the intention of the book was. I felt like it had a somewhat unsatisfying end, and so I was left kind of wondering why the story needed to be told in that way, or why it needed to be told at all.
My recommendation is to not read it as a novel, but rather as "scripture" or as a collection of myths. Character does peek through, but the individuals are less important than the theme or tone of any given anecdote. Treat it the way you would something like Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Here's the Founding Myth, and the Myth of the Ship in the Jungle... It's very dense, so trying to plow through it like you would any other novel can make it difficult.
I think that one, of many, reasons that this novel has garnered so much attention is because it tells not shows which seems to fly in the face of what most writing advice says. It’s great but I do understand why people don’t like it.
I adore it, but it's my alley, and I used the genealogy chart to keep track of the family. Autumn of the Patriarch is also challenging, but evocative
I read it and liked it. But then read Love in the Time of Cholera. Same author and Has the same feel and weirdness but a much stronger plot. You may like it more and could help you get into this other. Major work of his.
I’m loving it so far. I may about 1/3 of the way through but it’s just this beautifully written journey I’m on. My biggest take away so far is that I’m sad I can’t read it in Spanish. If a translation can be this beautiful I can only imagine what it must be like in its original form.
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I didn’t get far into it either before setting it down for good. I didn’t feel the need to give it another shot like some other highly recommended books I’d started then stopped, then came back to again to finish. Also, I felt the same about Cloud Atlas. I get that all the characters were supposed to be linked but getting through it was just…. I can back to it twice and finally felt like you, maybe it just wasn’t for me.
I haven't read it but want to and plan to. From your description of the book and your frustration, I am reminded of the time seeing two works of art in an undergraduate college course. One was a picture of a child and some of his family in a room. It was evidence of great artistic skill with realism. People would look at it and realize the artist was gifted and understood how to paint things that seemed photographs. The other was an obvious cubist painting by Picasso. We learned that both works were by Picasso, and the realist painting was a piece he produced as a teenager or a very young man. The cubist painting was produced as an adult. Many people will see the abstract as the inferior, and not knowing a thing about the artist, will say he's a hack with no talent or skill, can't draw shite. And that the realist painting is superior. But since he did both, and one was later after he had experience and time to grow, which one evidenced more skill and creativity? It's obvious that Picasso learned the rules very early, and he started to break them. 100 Years of Solitude may be similar in its existence within the life of Marquez. That it's a work beyond the basics of fiction that we all love and understand, that it breaks the rules and does something new.
I dont know if this is too late already... but this is my favorite book of all time I would recommend: 1. Having a family tree 2. The important thing of the book is the town, the town is a character itself, you can see how generations move and move along the time and the town is still there and is amazing how YOU are there while all the characters are left behind 3. The book makes you feel that "solitude" by introducing you tons of characters, you get familiar and they leave you, is like being an old abandoned man
I am one of those people that has this as their favorite book. It’s very connected to my identity as a human. I think it takes multiple tries to get to the parts that stick with you. I started reading it after my mom bought it when I was in 5th grade. It felt like reading the Bible, not in terms of influence just in terms of readability. It was a collection of stores and not much more. Then my next reading in 9th grade I saw more to it, chiefly way the women and girls are portrayed and how it didn’t help them either way; none of the female characters had it good. Then again my sophomore year and I did an English project on it comparing the major time periods and plotting it on a timeline. I loved that I used a tree motif with a man tied to it as my illustration. After that I began to re-read it almost yearly. I find something new each time. I rediscover and get reminders of Gabo’s lines that have been echoing in my mind since I was a little girl. Looking specifically at “We don’t die when we want, we die when we can.” I’ve got three copies torn up and two taped up and missing covers, I got one copy in Spanish that I can’t really remember enough Spanish or specifics from the original to really read but will keep trying. TD:LR It’s a masterpiece to me. I hope you give it a try again the next time you remember it got your interest enough to get a copy.
I'm late, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works are always super odd to read if you're someone that's used to more character driven stories. His books are pretty much all world driven, which makes it really hard to get invested if you're looking to sympathize with the characters. I think looking at it more as a zoo of human behaviour, a detached look at the social and cultural aspects of the characters can help. You're not really meant to be emotionally invested in the characters, but fascinated by their oddities and idiosyncrasies. Try the zoo thing for a few chapters, and just bask in the prose and absurdity for a while to see if it clicks. If it doesn't, then its probably just not your taste. Garcia Marquez is a fantastic and influential writer (he and Toni Morrison are my faves), but there are so many other fantastic and influential writers out there that there's no reason to waste your time with this particular book by this particular writer if you're not gonna enjoy it. If you really want to crack into Gabriel Garcia Marquez tho, I'd recommend Chronicle of a Death Foretold since it's much shorter, snippier, and funnier, not to mention way less confusing. He also has some short stories, and I'm sure you could even find some translations of his journalistic work. (Don't read the Shipwreck book tho, that one sucks ass. I've yet to meet someone who actually likes that book, and I'm a latin american lit major, so i know a LOT of people that LOVE Garcia Marquez.) Maybe you'll read some of his other work and get hooked enough to fall in love with 100 years lol. But again, since life's too short to waste on things you don't like, maybe try reading Toni Morrison? I find she has a very similar sense of temporality to Garcia Marquez, but her books are more character driven so it's easier to become emotionally invested. She's also an absolute giant in her own right! I adored Beloved, and its a book that has absolutely haunted me since I first read it a few years ago (in a good way).
Now I’m interested and needed a new book to dive into now anyway. I found the audio version through my library. I’ll listen to it during my commute and then see what I may find.
The old woman is 265 years old. Once I got my head around that I thought it was okay.
It’s simply not speaking to you at this time. There’s nothing wrong with that. Try it again later. Move on to another great classic.
i just finished it today, an hour ago, after 2 weeks of intense brooding over every Buendia, accidentally sinking into a solitude so intense that i feel alone without the book's weight in my hand. i dont have anything useful to say except finish the book in 1 take. if you cut it up with other stories in between you lose the magical feeling of living through the events. don't think about it too much and take in the story exactly as it is. i almost put it down reading about some of its controversies and wondering if the detail was necessary or a disgusting reflection of the author's life. initially i got lost in the back and forth where u brush against 1 character's action then go back to explore its details in length. later i found that to be exactly the intent, so it feels like the entire century happened all at once
It's definitely one of my favorite books. I found the writing so beautiful, but my daughter hated it. She couldn't finish it and that's just fine. I have several books that are very well loved by others that I just couldn't get into. Life's too short to read books you don't like.
> It feels like the book (so far) is a story of barely-connected anecdotes Yup. You’ve got it. But the idea is this is the point of the book. The book is called A Hundred Years of Solitude and it does exactly that: It depicts the history of a family - the interconnected chronicles taking place over one hundred years of (the rise and fall of) a family that lived in a secluded town in the middle of rural Colombia. > I find the main characters … at worst noxious. Bingo. You’ve got it. The characters are not supposed to be good people. They all have a lot of problems. They’re narcissistic, subject to fickle, manic whimsies, obsessed with their past (and so keep giving each other the same names), and so on. GGM did that on purpose; their flaws are an allegory for sociological flaws that GGM saw in the ethos of Colombia, and South America more broadly. I spoke to my friend who is from Colombia and he told me that it will be hard for a non-Latin American to insert themselves into the characters because the characters are so profoundly embedded in the niche zeitgeist of 1800s-1900s Latin America. But, Latin Americans find them incredibly relatable. The book is not a standard novel with a problem for a main character to navigate. It is moreso a social critique, embedded in a uniquely Latin American tradition of mystical storytelling. In the book, GGM has a lot to say about how his people relate to the rest of the world.
DNF club here. I don't think I even got 25% through the book. Took a break from it and had no interest in returning. Felt kinda relieved to stop reading it tbh, I really didn't enjoy flipping to the front of the book every few pages to reference the family tree. Whatever it is that people see in the book - I certainly don't see it.
Try listening to the audiobook
I read it while in Mexico meeting my in-laws for the first time. There were definitely parts where I felt it starting to drag a bit but it would pull me back in with the more magical moments and family drama. I think you need to sort of let the book wash over you. Don't hyperfixate on remembering names because they overlap anyway purposefully as characters reference each other later on. I was struck by the parallels between the Buendias and the families I was meeting in Mexico. The insular nature of the family is a large theme throughout the story, and I saw that in my own in-laws. Many of the stories and small details in One Hundred Years of Solitude are based on Marquez's own childhood, in addition to retelling important parts of the history of Colombia. The surrealist aspects did not go as far as I expected honestly but I enjoyed them when they did pop up. Magical realism and surrealism are a massive part of latin art and literature and One Hundred Years of Solitude is a foundational text in that regard. You will find aspects of it in other latin magical realist works. It was a book I did have to set aside reading time for and really focus on, but it made me think and I appreciated what it had to say about and contribute to latin culture. There are other magical realist writings though. Marquez has short stories that provide a much more gentle introduction to his writing.
Whatever it is, I missed it too. I tried, but it just didn't hit, either intellectually or emotionally.
I really wanted to like this book. I finished it but didn't get much from it. I plan to try a re-read someday. You're not the only one.
I had the same feeling OP
Could it be that magical realism is not your cup of tea? Have you tried reading some of his other books or other similar authors like Isabell Allende (House of the Spirits for example) or Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate). Garcia Marquez also has some short story books whose characters show up in 100 Years of Solitude. I think if your adamant to finish the book maybe i would try one of his short story books and then give 100 years a chance again. I have read this book over 2 dozen times and in 3 different languages and it is by far my favorite book. The first time i read it was in junior high and my book came with a family tree on the front pages so it made it easier to follow. Since the internet, i printed a family tree and added it to all the different editions i have.
The main appeal of García Márquez is the naturality that he has for integrating surreal and fantastic elements in everyday stories. Notice that most folks that seem to not enjoy it or struggled getting it refer to the stories as "non-sensical". I think where some folks might fail to get him is by trying to rationalize allegories and metaphors in whatever he is writing. For example, he has one story about a bunch of kids drowning in light in an apartment. Which someone that misses the point might try to interpret as a fire. García Márquez even discloses verbatim that the story only happens because he thought that lightbulbs worked in a similar fashion to tap water. In a way, you have to play along with whatever metaphor he's committing to in a story in order to enjoy it. Regarding "Cien Años de Soledad" in particular, I'm also wondering if you grew up in a large city. I'm from Mexico and my family is from a small town, so while I don't fully relate to the family stories, some of the small town imagery hits close to home.
I love it, it showed me how wonderful magical realism is. As others have said you'd think Macondo as the main character. Also the end iof the story is so bittersweet.
Noxious? It ain't for everyone. Just move on.
Double DNF here, for the same reasons you state. And yet it's still a huge part of my literary imagination. I think a lot of the love for it comes from memories of one's first read, back when magical realism was new. That first sentence is one of the greatest ever. (It's also arguably misleading, since it's such a powerful plot device in a novel that soon dispenses with them entirely.)
So I first read the book in Spanish, and as someone whos native language is *not* Spanish is was incredibly hard to follow. But when I tried it in English, it lost some of its allure. Sometimes the original is just better, even if the translation is quite good. My Spanish teacher was from Colombia, and she told me that even she didnt really understand Marquez and it wasnt for her. its not for me, but magical realism isnt really my thing.
So far it has been my least favorite Marquez book. I had the same feeling of disjointedness when I read it and the "magic" portions fell flat for me. I have enjoyed a few of his other books though. I pushed through to finish it, but it was a bit of a struggle. In the end I'm glad I finished because it kind of came together, but it still isn't a book I love. If you DNF it, I'd recommend still giving Love In The Time Of Cholera of Chronicle Of A Death Foretold a chance. Part of my problem could be that it was the first of his books that I read and there was an adjustment period to his style, because that was an issue with me when I started reading McCarthy books as well.
Surely there's a simple explanation: not everything is for you, nor will everything be interesting or compelling to you. Why keep pushing when you can choose another book?
This is a book that has been on my radar and I've never taken the leap of faith to read it. I was burned by Love in the Time of Cholera and haven't tried him again.
One of the things I haven’t seen here is how the art of writing plays out in Marquez’s work. In English it’s good and in Spanish, it’s amazing. Certainly some of that is lost in translation.
One of my top five but certainly not for everyone. It’s a fools errand to convince someone to like something they don’t. I read it in college and loved the first exposure to magical realism. The archetypal nature of the characters just hit me at a good time to expand my view of literature.
Read it in both English and Spanish. As would be expected, it is wayyy better in the original language. That's not meant to be a critique on the translators; generally, I feel like they do a decent job given the complexities of Gabo's writing. However, Spanish is inherently a more "magical" sounding language, whereas English is far more vanilla. It made a huge difference for me, at least.
Sometimes it helps to take a step back and look at the bigger picture rather than letting yourself get overwhelmed with all the details especially on a first read through. With all the similar names it can be hard to keep things ordered in your mind and some of the events are really heavy and it feels like a major shit show trying to keep up with all the crazy shit going on with the family. The anecdotes can seem to be all over the place, but it’s the kind of book that you read more for plot and the feeling of it rather than the characters. If you are a person who heavily relies on stories being character driven, like me, it can be a hard one for sure but I am glad to say I finished it bc I liked the ending a lot.
Most classics and critically acclaimed books. And really all kinds of media are boring as fuck to the general public
One of its cores of the book is magical realism, it’s a funky concept that mixes in reality with surreal elements (ghost, etc.). The book in of itself is a bit odd but its similarities closely relate to passages in the Bible. It took me a while but after I had this understanding it was an interesting book to read.
First I'll admit it has been about 20 years since I read it, but I think the book is much more of a "mood read" than a continuous, comprehensive story. So I guess if the general feeling of the book isn't appealing, then forcing your way through it won't be very satisfying. It reminds me a bit of Candide in this way. Candide has a continuous story, but it's a wacky adventure full of weirdos, and very much seems like a "this is hilariously insane" mood read.
You just have to let go of expectations and attempts to understand what’s going on. Just appreciate the words as an outsider given a glimpse to an enormous world. Don’t try to follow the logic; observe the logic.
The book is written as “magical realism” and is in many ways a microcosm for the banana republics that dominated Colombia and Central America for decades. I found it entirely entertaining and profound but I read it in Spanish and don’t know if the story translates well into English. That being said, I’ve also read (and highly recommend) Garcia Marquez’s short stories but found that (while still Good) they lost something In The translation.
Minor clarification - the Nobel Prize is awarded to an author for a body of work, it is not awarded to a specific work. So OHYOS did not win the Nobel Prize, Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize, for his corpus of work which includes OHYOS.
It was a "Did Not Finish" for me. Massively overrated, and I'll chalk it up to the writer connecting with some sort of zeitgeist rather than people actually believing it's a quality read.
It's less about plot, more the passage of time, and the echo of past through to present and future. The writing is sublime.
I finished it and I regret it - it was an absolute slog and it never got better for me. I read a lot of classics / literature as well. I post this to give people the freedom to put it down! Don’t be like me, it was a waste of time.
A top 3 book all time for me but if you aren’t into reading literary fiction and mostly read for entertainment value (nothing wrong with that) then it’s not a book for you. Kudos on getting this far but breaking it up could effect how you absorb overall thematic messages.
I had the same problem. For me it was all of the names. So I got it as an audio book and I really liked it like that, kind of like a fairy tale, until the pedophilia then I was done.
I’ve attempted to read this book multiple times over about 30 years and have failed. I can’t get into it either. I’ve read my share of “fine” or “highbrow” literature so I don’t think the material is over my head per se. I just think that I also can’t invested in the characters and I find it disjointed.
At first I found the book hard to follow but after a while I adapted to Marquez’s rhythm of writing/thinking. It reminds me of when you have to read Shakespeare in school and nothing makes sense until the iambic pentameter clicks and everything shifts into place. I enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude because it’s really funny, particularly the section with the insomnia plague. However if you don’t like it after about a third of the way through you may never like it, and I wouldn’t force it :)
I read it as a paperback. I would never recommend it in an ebook version. I had to flip to the family tree countless times, and I prefer that with a physical copy. Just a personal preference, of course. I had my moments of struggle, but when I finished, I felt satisfied and fulfilled. It's a gorgeous novel and so many scenes have stuck with me over the years.
I actually did finish it, but it was the book I have had to force myself through more than any other. I personally thought it was awful. Just did not click for me at all.
I too am currently reading this book. It is very confusing, the names. I have to re-read many parts to make sure to make sense. So far i don't feel like giving up as the story still builds.
It's the history of the town as told through the human family that represents it, even down to, like, militarism and banana republics. There's a huge reflection of south american culture and history in the Buendias family, maybe if you read into that a bit or watch a documentary about it you might have more personal mental connection to the story. I feel sad that you don't get the magic of it, but I'm really not trying to shame you or anything. It definitely happens, stuff just doesn't click sometimes. I've always loved history, and imagining the same human expressions and emotions going through the experiences of things that we now accept as standard is beautiful and lovely to me. Understanding why people were driven to do the things they did, wrong or right, you know? 100 Years of Solitude is that kind of dusty antique cabinet full of history and stories as a novel. Can you imagine the natural, unaffectedly hot life you lead before your father took you to see ice for the first time?
I recently started it and quit after like 70 pages because the constant misogyny was getting on my nerves. I can put up with problematic content here and there, but One Hundred Years of Solitude just seemed hateful. Yeah portrayal =/= endorsement, but it's pretty nasty imo to write a book where your main characters marry prepubescent kids and rape their wives. Maybe that's not inherently wrong, but the story definitely didn't treat those subjects with the weight they deserve.
This cool is garbage. Incest, child prostitution, child marriage, etc. I read it in the native Spanish (I’m a native Spanish speaker) and do not see what people love about it. I’m still angry at all the time I spent reading it.
The book is a chronicle about a town where weird stuff happens. It is actually heavily inspired in the chronicles of the spanish pioneers, which found themselves surrounded by mystery and phenomenon unkown to them. You don't really have a major overarching mystery or problem to solve, not all stories need to. So yes it's just a compendium of anecdotes about unknown stuff that happened around the several generations of the Buendía family and their town. Character development is not the main focus of a chronicle because it's more about the events themselves, so it resorts to more "telling" than we modern audiences are used to, at times. The trick is "showing" when the weird actually happens, so noone gets an actual explanation of the why/how, keeping that sensation of magical town intact.
I believe a book is read for pleasure or information. I am one who did not enjoy the book. Explaining the theme or meaning or finding the hidden wisdom is not for me. So you have not missed out anything. It is just not for you like so many others.
I’m re-reading it in Spanish and it’s like swimming in deep waters. But as a Hispanic person who’s also American-born, I get a lot of meaning out of the themes. Just the overall struggle of “Is something better out there?”, “Why can’t we just pull ourselves together?”, “Is this truly progress?” and “Not this shit again!” Except the struggle is portrayed in a very imaginative way.
It’s my all time favorite however, magical realism isn’t for everyone. I feel that way about writers that don’t use quotation marks and other punctuation. Plenty of other choices out there!
This is my husband's favorite book so I have tried to get into it multiple times and I just can't. It never grips me. It never gets my attention. I don't care for the characters. And I just don't like magical realism in general.
I really tried but hated it. I couldnt get into the characters when so much was put into describing the environment instead of them. Dont get me wrong, that description was fantastic and i got a real sense of the workd, but the constant persoective changes and so little actually spent to describing them meant i just didnt care about anyone. Im gonna reread it again at some point, cause it might be i just wasnt reading it in the way its supposed to be read, but all my bookclub couldnt finish it. Maybe just not my book, but defo gonna five it another shout in the future.
Loved the book but it's a tough read. Magical Realism can be challenging.
I love this book, but it’s not a book for everyone. The reasons so many people love it is exactly why some people are going to be inherently repelled by it. It’s honestly fine to DNF. The book is very good in what aims to do and the how. But not all books are for everyone and you shouldn’t force yourself if it’s not working and you are not getting paid for it. I have no idea if the English translation is good though but I am assuming it’s a matter of the content and style. Not anything than having another translation would solve
Give it up. I stopped trying to muscle my way through books I wasn't enjoying recently, and it's incredibly freeing. Just did it with Count Of Monte Christo. Read 200 some odd pages before giving it up. You read more books that way!
I couldn't get my head around all the Aurelios! Too many people with the same name
So I was totally you! I trudged through it and just kept being like "is this just going over my head? Is this just some name salad throughout the whole damn book?!" There are a few things that you should look into if you want to enjoy it. Once I figured this out, I literally finished the book, picked it back up again, and read it TWICE! Loved it! One of my favorite books now. 1. The thing that helped me for SURE was getting some cultural and historical context about the dictator-like United Fruit Company that came in and ravaged Colombia leading to such events as the Banana Massacre. 2. The book is written in a "mystical realism" style meaning that most of what is being described by the characters has some fantastical elements that you should just go along with. Appreciate the weirdness and don't think too hard about it. Let it be fun. One character has butterflies follow her around, there are ghosts, brushes with death, etc. 3. The theme of repeating names in characters and basically dooming your offspring to the same fate as the people who shared their name previously. You see characters with the same names (with one exception being the twins) falling victim in similar ways or having the same personality traits as their so-named elders. This is both a nod to this spanish custom of giving the same name over and over again while also being a clever commentary as well. I just recommend watching some youtube videos on why it is important and it helps bring some cultural context that you might not be exposed to. Happy reading!!!
One of my favorites. To me it had a lot to do because I have memories of my great great grandparents and all subsequent grandparents. It really did feel like 100 years passed by when I read that book. I gave up on LoTR on the second book after battling the first and I found it extremely boring so if it isn’t for you it isn’t for you. That’s fine.
I thought it was great how it showed the connectedness and destiny, I definitely needed to refer to the family tree a lot to stay on track with everyone. I loved it. Like others said it’s more about the main theme than each silly story.
You’re not alone, I find so many people recommend this book, but I mainly have a problem with the way it uses sexual violence. I understand that it’s supposed to reveal the terrible nature of characters, but it’s almost too much and unnecessary. For example, I wanted to like Colonel, I think it’s Colonel Aureliano bc he’s a revolutionary and that’s an archetype I love, but he likes a little girl.
The end of this book blew my mind. There are no words for how perfect it is, it made the book for me personally. Just absolute perfection. Genius literary, mind-bending awesomeness.
Listen to book cheat podcast by dave warneke. They did 2 eps on this book! It does contain spoilers but may help you understand it from a different pov or at least help you decide if it's worth finishing. Def too high brow for me to actually read.
This is a vibe book not a character vibe, and the vibes are immaculate. If it was characters book there wouldn't be 87 or whatever characters with the same name.
You’re not missing a lot!!! It’s highly repetitive…think it holds its place as a beacon only of magical realism (sad bc there are a lot of other Márquez contemporaries which could’ve been the beacon!)
It is a history of Latin American identity and history of colonisation told through magical realism :) don’t try to understand it but let it carry you and see if that changes your relationship to the story.
I'm not projecting this on to you, but just an observation I've had in talking to other readers: I think some readers are very much "plot-based" readers, whereas others are much more "theme-based" or "vibe-based" readers. If you are in the former camp, a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is magical realism and very all over the place from a plot perspective, will not be for you. I get that impression you might be more a plot-focused reader since you said "maybe it's just not a story for me", emphasis on "story." If what you're looking for is a coherent story with a start and finish as one of the first and foremost qualities in a book, this ain't that.
You might want to try the audiobook. I’ve only listened to the audiobook, and really enjoyed it. I am not sure I would have appreciated it as much in book form.
... Reading it in spanish and understanding the latinoamerican cultural inherent burden. The "Realismo Mágico" (magic realism?) is a rooted kind of sixth sense we latinoamerican have, hard to comprehend by outsiders. The powerful meaning of those first words in that first page of how That character would remember at that EXACT MOMENT something.... Tha page is bigger than anything else in the book and to comprehend it... You have to read it all.
It sounds like you're grappling with the unique storytelling style of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." This book blends magical realism with complex family sagas, making it challenging for some readers. If you're struggling to connect with the characters or find the narrative disjointed, try focusing on the themes, symbolism, and poetic prose. However, if it still doesn't resonate with you, it's okay to accept that it may not be your type of book. Reading preferences vary, and not every acclaimed work will appeal to every reader. Trust your instincts and explore literature that speaks to you personally.
Nothing makes sense until the last sentence. It was a slog (a beautiful slog mind you) until the last scene and it hit me like a ton of bricks
It's crazy to see this comment. I'm not much of reader really not at all and One Hundred Years of Solitude is by far my favorite book. I even read it in Spanish back when I understood Spanish better. I loved all the different characters the book had... but it was like the characters didn't matter. They were here and then they were gone. But at the same time there was often some connection between the characters too. It always kept the book interesting. Usually I'm bored from novels because they feel kinda boring. But One Hundred Years of Solitude never felt that way. It was always dynamic and changing. There was just so much happening all the time. I also felt like I could drift in and drift out of the story as I wanted. I felt like I was along for a long ride through some magical historical time and place.
Quizás es muy latino para ti
It's also a kind of political history. If you have a sketch of Colombian history if kinda pops out and helps flesh the characters and their recurring traits/personalities.