One Hundred Years of Solitude

J'avais énormément d'attentes vu la reputation PHENOMENALE de ce livre, au final je trouves ça bon mais sans plus. Le titre m'a beaucoup attiré parceque je crois que je suis aussi atteint par cette malédiction de la solitude et la conclusion me pousse à recontacter mes "vieux" amis, j'imagine qu'il y a dans le texte pour chaque génération un certain type de solitude mais j'avoues ne pas tout avoir saisi si c'est le cas. Sinon bons sous-textes sur la course à la technologie qui peut être mauvaise pour la vie humaine, bonne critique du capitalisme/colonialisme avec les "républiques bananières", petites critiques de la religion aussi. Le livre est extrêmement dense, je peux pas dire que je me suis particulièrement ennuyé en le lisant mais passant à coté du sous-texte on se retrouve perdu plusieurs fois. Mtn hâte de voir l'adaptation netflix d'une oeuvre qui me semble très lié au format papier

"If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself!"

Like [b:Dune|44767458|Dune (Dune, #1)|Frank Herbert|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1555447414l/44767458.SY75.jpg|3634639] from last year, this book had been on my TBR list for the longest time, because I always felt like it was one of those books I should read, but never made time to actually do so. It probably would've stayed there forever (like Dune, actually) if my book club friends hadn't picked it for the book to read this month and I stopped running out of reasons to tell myself to not read it. I've tackled literary vegetables before (books I don't normally read but should) with mixed results, but mostly the experiences have been positive. This book was not a positive experience for me.

This review will be a drop in the bucket of reviews for this book, so I'll keep things brief. The book is a generational look at a family living in the fictitious village/town/city of Macondo, sort of a train wreck into a tire fire that you can't help but not look away from. There's incest. There's pedophilia. There's infidelity. There's bestiality. There's even more incest. Seriously, their family tree is less a branching tree and more like a straight stick. You get to watch Macondo develop from basically this tiny village into something more developed, watch the family revolve around its own debasement, watch the townsfolk essentially forget they exist (willfully, probably), and then have a satisfying conclusion when the family house (where only a single family member remains at this point) gets wiped off its foundation and the book ends. I think even the God they believed in got fed up with the amount of incest in that family.

There's positive aspects of the book. The writing style is fantastic, really evocative in places, but a bit inconsistent. We spent an inordinate amount of time on the most minor of events, and then speed through things that I felt like needed more than a casual byline. I really liked Ursula, the matriarch of the family who manages to outlive most of them in her fervent quest to try and bring some order and semblance to the carnage she hath wrought. There's plenty of amusing moments as well, both intentionally and unintentionally. Remedios' death was probably meant to be sad, but imagining her literally flying away with the bedsheets to heaven had me giggling for a while.

I'm no stranger to magical realism, I love a good Haruki Murakami book, for instance. I just didn't get the same feeling here as I do from his books. The chapters felt long and tedious, and I felt like there was just too much included for the sake of inclusion that didn't really add to the book at all. We're constantly hit over the head with the themes of history repeating itself and solitude/loneliness (and the color yellow), it just felt very repetitive by the time I got halfway through.

So, my low review stands. I can at least cross it off my list of books I should read, but I'd have a hard time recommending it to people. I don't even know the sort of person I could look at and go, "yeah, you look like an incest/One Hundred Years of Solitude kind of person..."

(Read in the original Spanish)
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece, one of those rare books that put me in a trance and take zero effort to read. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has such mastery over words that I almost felt like I wasn't reading at my pace but one deliberately set by him, setting up turns of phrase and reveals that matched the cadence at which he wanted me to read. It's magic realism at its finest, even its overall structure reflects this; how it evolves from an ahistorical almost allegorical narrative to one that is increasingly overtaken by context and reality as it goes on, how one keeps fighting against the confusing repetitive names throughout generations of characters (a common complaint) in the same way the Buendía family fights to break out of the historical cycles it keeps falling victim to; does it matter which Aureliano you're reading about? In the same way I want to say yes the characters are constantly trying and failing to define themselves as individuals. Narratively it's structured as a series of vignettes framed as mundane occurrences that are nonetheless filled with magic and unpredictable wonders. I can tell this story of a family (and community) trying to carve a place for themselves in the face of encroaching history will stay with me for a long time.

I do not have much experience in reading dense, rich, and highly imaginative fiction, so my views on this classic book might lack proper comparisons to other such work. But I did enjoy this book more than I expected when I started reading it. It is fairly obvious that a lot of the cultural commentary the author probably tried to provide in this book is lost on me since I know very little about Latin American culture. Still, there are many universal themes in the book that even a novice like me can understand. I imagine this book would be much richer for someone who is more familiar with the culture and reads the book in Spanish. Yet, I marvel at the skill with which the author fills even the most mundane sentence with liveliness and imagination. It took me some time to get used to the style this book is written. But once I was engaged it was always interesting.

This was interesting till about half way, then it just got too long for my taste. It's the story of a family living in the invented town of Macondo in Columbia, following them from the founding of the town to the end of the family line through many generations (and despite the title, it seems like it should be longer than 100 years, based on how many generations there are ... or maybe it just feels that way). For added confusion, children and grandchildren are frequently given the same names as their predecessors and also frequently share similar family personality traits, so keeping the relationships straight is more than a small challenge.

Apparently Marquez is one of the first writers to use “magical realism,” a style of fantasy wherein the fantastic and the unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences, and this book is a great example of that. Strange and impossible things frequently happen and are just accepted as a normal part of life by the family. I've read other books that used this technique and sometimes it works well, but I'm not sure it added anything to this book for me. The story was already confusing enough without wondering whether occurrences are really happening or are just in the imagination of the character experiencing them or something else.

Spoilers: In general the book deals with family life, how themes repeat within a family and affect generations down the line, how happiness and sadness and luck and misfortune exist together and can change from one to the other in an instant. Specifically, it follows the family from their first encounters with a travelling gypsy wise man who gives them various things including some mysterious writings, and the story goes through 100 years of the family's descendents until the final son of the family finally manages to decipher the scribbled notes (written in sanskrit) that the gypsy left them but which could not be translated until 100 years have passed. It turns out the notes are an exact history of the family from the time the gypsy first met them until the time the final son dies, and as he translates the end of it the story concludes.

I dunno. It's nicely written and some of the characters are interesting, but it really felt rambly and too long and pointless for my preference.

I'd heard all the hype about this "literary great" and this magical / ethereal story and was intrigued. I'd never read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez before so I had no real idea what to expect but my expectations were high as people seem to rate it so highly and talk about how clever it is.

What I got was a very strange story about the entire history of a family living in an odd "magical" version of the world where bizarre things happen such as autistic girl flying away to heaven, or incestuous relationships between an aunt and child, or people seeing ghosts, or incestuous relationships between siblings, or brutal masacres that never happened or rains storms lasting years. And many visits to brothels in between.

At the end of the book I was left with the feeling that while I enjoyed the unusual ride, I had no idea what the hell the point of the whole thing was. Since finishing it I've read up a little on what the book is about (it's apparently partially a parable about the great failings of the Columbian nation) and I've realized that I'm not really supposed to fully get this book. I feel much of the meaning behind this story has literally been 'lost in translation'; to truly completely appreciate this book you probably need to share Marquez's cultural history (including the numerous oblique references to real life events made by parallel events that occur in the story).

However despite perhaps not fully understanding the message Marquez wanted to send with this work, I can still appreciate it for what it is. It's a beautifully written if frequently rather odd fable. It's cleverly written, drawing the reader in to make you care about the many characters who flit in and then out of the story. At times it's funny and at times it's very sad. But in English, for me at least, it's an oddity - a good read but not really a truly great one because too much of it's meaning has been lost by the translation into another culture and possibly the passage of time. It's well worth reading, but I wouldn't expect the book to live up to some of the hype.