"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..."