One Hundred Years of Solitude — Review
Book by Gabriel García Márquez
★★★★★
Weird, Magical Awesomeness
(Spoiler Free Review)
The awesomeness of the book has no bounds. This was a unique kind of setting where Marquez took us into. It is essentially the story of the town of Macondo. Its like humanization of the town, taking us through the journey of the town from the innocence and curiosity of a child seen in Jose Acardio Buenduea and how he along with others in town get excited and infatuated to the new toys that the gypsies bring. After that this child is introduced to new things like science, knowledge, politics, religion, freedom, money, pain, oppression there are all emotions that we go through along with the town and its people. Then it sees adulthood where it learns about sex and carnal desires, marriages, and in the end, we could feel the town getting old and eventually dying.
The setting, the colorful, peaceful Moccondo, and the elements of magical realism reminds me of the old cartoons that we used to see as children. As a child, we imagined the things as they were shown and we just accepted them without a lot of reasoning. In any other book, it would have been too difficult the magical things, but I think I could accept it here because all the characters were so adorable and there was so much happening around in which the author goes deep into that you would just accept it as it is because there is so much more to get into.
I am very bad with remembering names in a story, only I know how I saw Game of Thrones. Initially, as I read reviews with everyone having the same name I thought confusion will be of another level. But once I started it there was no such issue, every character has an aura and we tend to identify it by this unique way he lives, he/she has a thing that only he/she would do. Along with some common traits of their ancestors/namesakes that they acquire.
There were times in the story when I could feel transported into the Latin American summers, at the time of rain I sometimes had a feeling that it was raining outside, whereas it was the hottest day of the year outside.
At some time it did feel repetitive and quiet lengthy in the last 5–7% of the book, but we had seen most of the things by then. Most of the time it was a smooth ride and the book kept a grip on me. I felt the first half of the characters were built much better than the later ones.
I would highly recommend this book to most of my friends.
